Getting started

One-time setup. About ten minutes on a fresh Ubuntu machine or VM. After this, every lab is a single command.

What you need

A Linux host or VM — Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 is the tested path. WSL2 on Windows works too.
4 GB of free RAM and a few GB of disk.
sudo access. Containerlab manages network namespaces and needs it.

On a Mac or Windows laptop, the simplest route is a small Ubuntu VM in VirtualBox, UTM, or Multipass. No nested virtualization is needed — FRR runs as a plain container.

Install

Docker

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Log out and back in so the group change takes effect.

Containerlab

bash -c "$(curl -sL https://get.containerlab.dev)"

Confirm with containerlab version.

Pull the router image once
```
docker pull frrouting/frr:latest
```
Every lab uses this same image, so this is the only download.

Run a lab

unzip lab-01-ospf-area-boundary.zip
cd lab-01-ospf-area-boundary
./labctl deploy

Each lab folder has the same launcher with the same commands:

./labctl deploy     # bring it up and apply the scenario
./labctl status     # neighbor state and routes at a glance
./labctl verify     # check your fix
./labctl reset      # back to the broken starting state
./labctl destroy    # tear it down

Working in vtysh

FRR's shell is modeled on IOS. Get into a router with:

docker exec -it clab-<lab-name>-r1 vtysh

From there the commands you already know work as expected:

show ip route
show ip ospf neighbor
show ip ospf database
show ip bgp summary
show running-config
configure terminal

The differences you'll notice: interfaces are named eth1, eth2 rather than GigabitEthernet; prefixes use CIDR (10.0.0.0/24) rather than wildcard masks; and in BGP, neighbors are activated under address-family ipv4 unicast. That's about the whole list for OSPF and BGP work.

If something's off

Permission denied on Docker — you haven't re-logged in after the usermod step.
"OSPF did not converge" from the launcher — run ./labctl status; usually the image is still starting. Run ./labctl reset.
Containers from a previous lab still around — sudo containerlab destroy --all cleans everything.

Start with the free lab