Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) container

Building

First you need the Linux installer for the target NSO release from Cisco. Then you have two options for building the container, either use the dockerbuild.sh script or call docker build directly. Using the script will result in a slightly smaller container image as it pulls the install files from a local temporary HTTP server instead of including those files in the Docker context and doing additional COPY operations in the Dockerfile.

First, put the non-signed NSO installer in the install-files directory. If you need to unpack it first from a signed installer, do:

sh ./<signed installer> --skip-verification

If you want to use the script, run:

./dockerbuild.sh <local server IP> [--nsoVer <NSOver>] [--serverPort <FileServerPort>] [--dockerfile <Dockerfile>]

Note the optional NSO version (default 5.4.4.3), server port (default 48888), and Dockerfile (default Dockerfile.script) arguments. There are some additional optional arguments if you look at the script.

If you don't want to use the script, use the install-files directory as the Docker build context and do the build from there:

cd ./install-files
NSOver=<NSOver> docker build --build-arg build_date=$(date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ') --build-arg nso_ver=$NSOver -t $USER/nso:$NSOver .

You can override any of the other ARG defaults in the Dockerfile with additional --build-arg.

Running the container

It's strongly recommended you launch the container non-interactively so logging and child process exits are handled properly. For example (with randomly-assigned ports):

docker run -d --rm -P --name nso-test <image>

Once launched, you can exec into the running container as the "ncsadmin" user:

docker exec -it -u ncsadmin nso-test /bin/bash

To stop/shutdown the container:

docker container stop nso-test

NSO setup

Once you're in the running container, you can proceed with the initial NSO setup for an NSO local install. Note ncs-run is a common naming convention for the directory where a local install of NSO will store its operational data, but you could call it whatever you want:

ncs-setup --dest ./ncs-run
cd ./ncs-run
ncs
ncs_cli -Cu admin

Build and run for an NSO system install

This is still a bit experimental. The alternate Dockerfile.script.system can support both local and system installs. For system:

./dockerbuild.sh <local server IP> [--nsoVer <NSOver>] --dockerfile Dockerfile.script.system --nsoInstallType system

To run the container:

docker run -d --rm -P --name nso-system-test <image>

NSO should start automatically when the container is launched. Then exec in as before:

docker exec -it -u ncsadmin nso-system-test /bin/bash

When stopping/shutting down the container, make sure you give NSO time to exit cleanly and close its database, especially if you plan on restarting the container (or another instance) with the same data. The default Docker stop timeout should be fine:

docker container stop nso-system-test