Set Up Your Lab Environment

NetworkNinjas labs run on your own machine, not in the browser. Each lab is a handful of real routers that you boot locally and log into. To do that you need two tools installed once: Docker and Containerlab.

This page gets you set up. It is a one-time thing: once Docker and Containerlab are working, every lab in the curriculum just runs.

What the labs need

• Docker the container runtime that actually runs the routers.
• Containerlab the tool that wires those containers together into a network topology from a .clab.yml file.
• A Linux environment, because Containerlab uses Linux networking under the hood.

Pick your path by operating system

• Linux: install Docker, then install Containerlab. Everything runs natively.
• macOS: install Docker Desktop. Containerlab runs inside Docker Desktop's Linux VM, not directly on macOS, which is fine for these labs.
• Windows: use WSL2 with a Linux distribution plus Docker Desktop, and run Containerlab from inside WSL2.

The official Containerlab docs cover every operating system and stay current as the tool changes, so treat them as the source of truth: containerlab.dev/install. (You can also grab Docker from docs.docker.com.)

Verify your setup

Once both are installed, confirm they work:

containerlab version
docker version

If both print version information, you are ready to go.

A note on the first deploy

The first time you run containerlab deploy, it downloads the router image (FRRouting), so it may take a minute. After that, the image is cached and labs boot in seconds.

What's next

That's it. Head to your first lab, bgp-observe-a-session, where you'll boot a real pair of routers and read a live BGP session.