POX Django Minimal integration

The initial idea and code snippets belong to Sam Russell from his following blog posts: DjangoFlow - Web UI for the POX OpenFlow controller DjangoFlow part two: Quick and simple UI

The Pongo application is consisted of 3 main parts. The Django part, the poxweb Django application that integrates POX with Django and a small library for integration with Community-Lab.

As a tree structure, Pongo looks like a Django project. The server which leads to the Django administration interface can be started normally by configuring the Pongo/settings.py file properly and running the following commands:

python manage.py syncdb python manage.py runserver

The Poxweb application is a Django application that also contains the POX functionality and is located in the poxweb folder. We will now describe the most interesting files:

models.py: Contains the Django models that describe the links and the slivers.

admin.py: Includes the Django models in the Django administrations environment.

ext/db.py: A backend library for the POX application, that queries the Django database.

ext/dbpoll.py: A backend daemon for the POX application, that is asynchronously checking if changes concerning the links occured in the database.

ext/l2topo.py: The main POX application that handles the POX OpenFlow events and translates them to Django actions. At the same time it receives information from dbpoll.py concerning the database changes and translates them to OpenFlow rules if necessary.

Since it is a part Django application, POX should be started after the Django server. The CLI command to start the POX application is:

./pox.py l2topo

poxweb/ext/slice.py: This module implements the REST communication between POX and any Community-Lab node. In case the user does not want to use Pongo with Community-Lab but with his own set of nodes he should implement the communication overriding this module.