Hands-on Environment/Lab

In this lesson, we will cover:

• How to download the code repo that accompanies this course.
• How to install the requirements and set up your environment ready to get hands-on.

Overview

In addition to the course content, this course also provides a code repo and access to a multi-vendor lab.

Below are the steps required to access both:

Code Repo Download

To download the associated code repo for this course, perform the following:

$ git clone git@github.com:packetcoders/pyats-course.git
$ cd pyats-course

Install Environment Dependencies

Create Virtual Environment

First we will create a virtual environment into which we will install our requirements.

# Create a new venv directory
mkdir ../venv

# Create a virtual environment
python3 -m venv ../venv/venv-pyats

# Activate the virtual environment
source ../venv/venv-pyats/bin/activate

Install Dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Setup Credentials

Next, add your credentials for the lab into a file named .env. You can create a copy of the file from .env.example as follows:

$ cp .env.example .env
$ cat .env
LAB_USERNAME=<username>
LAB_PASSWORD=<password>

The credentials for populating the .env file can be found within the lab guide here: https://www.packetcoders.io/packet-coders-nebula-2/

The environment variables from .env will now be automatically imported when you run the examples in the course that need access to the lab devices or services.
This .env import is performed using python-dotenv, and the following code:

from dotenv import load_dotenv

# Load environment variables from .env
load_dotenv()