johnhringiv/frenetic

The Frenetic Programming Language and Runtime System

Welcome to Frenetic

The languages used to program networks today lack modern features. Programming them is a complicated and error-prone task, and outages and infiltrations are frequent. Frenetic is an open-source Software Defined Network (SDN) controller platform designed to make SDN programming easy, modular, and semantically correct, based on programming languages with the following essential features:

• High-level abstractions that give programmers direct control over the network, allowing them to specify what they want the network to do without worrying about how to implement it.
• Modular constructs that facilitate compositional reasoning about programs.
• Portability, allowing programs written for one platform to be reused with different devices.
• Rigorous semantic foundations that precisely document the meaning of the language and provide a solid platform for mechanical program analysis tools.

You can build Frenetic-based network applications with:

• OCaml
• Python
• REST and JSON (i.e., any programming language!)

Getting Started

Installation

1. Install OPAM, version 2.0 or higher.

2. Switch to OCaml version 4.06.0 or greater:

   opam switch 4.06.0    
   

3. Install dune:

   opam install dune
   

4. Install required OCaml dependencies. Note that dune can compute the list of dependencies,

   dune external-lib-deps --missing @all
   

   and you can install each using OPAM---for example:

   opam install ocamlgraph    
   

5. Build Frenetic

   make && make install
   

6. (Optional) install Mininet

Hello World in SDN

The following instructions assume a Linux host with Mininet installed.

1. Start up a terminal window.

2. Start up a Mininet sample network with a switch and 2 hosts:

   $ sudo mn --topo=single,2 --controller=remote
   

3. Try pinging the host h2 from the host h1:

   mininet> h1 ping h2
   

   Unfortunately, the ping won't work because you don't have an SDN network program in place! Press CTRL-C to stop the pinging.

4. Start up another terminal window and start up Frenetic:

   $ frenetic http-controller --verbosity debug
   

5. In a third terminal window, start up the example program for the Python repeater:

   $ python -m frenetic.examples.repeater
   

6. Now, back in the window running Mininet, the ping should now succeed:

   mininet> h1 ping h2
   

   Congratulations! You now have a working Software Defined Network.

Where to Go From Here

• Learn Frenetic programming in Python from the Frenetic Programmers Guide
• Scan the Quick Start guides in the Wiki
• Try some Python examples, see Example Applications in Python
• Learn Frenetic programming in OCaml from the Frenetic Tutorial
• Learn the theory behind Frenetic by reading the papers at http://frenetic-lang.org
• See examples of production Frenetic-based SDN's at https://github.com/coscin/coscin-app and https://github.com/coscin/gates.
• Consult the Frenetic API documentation.

Contributing

Frenetic is an open source project, and we encourage you to contribute!

• File Issues and Feature Requests in Github Issues
• Join the Frenetic Mailing List for more in-depth guidance

Credits

See Frenetic Members and Support

License

Frenetic is released under the GNU Lesser Public License, version 3. Details