This package is a replacement for the debian ifupdown package. It is ifupdown re-written in python. It maintains the original ifupdown pluggable architecture and extends it further.
The python-ifupdown2 package provides the infrastructure for parsing /etc/network/interfaces file, loading, scheduling and state management of interfaces.
It dynamically loads python modules from /usr/share/ifupdownaddons. To remain compatible with other packages that depend on ifupdown, it also executes scripts under /etc/network/. To make the transition smoother, a python module under /usr/share/ifupdownaddons will override a script by the same name under /etc/network/.
It publishes an interface object which is passed to all loadble python modules. For more details on adding a addon module, see the section on adding python modules.
Unlike original ifupdown, all interface configuration is moved to external python modules. That includes inet, inet6 and dhcp configurations.
A set of default modules are included in the package.
python-ifupdown2 expects a few things from the pluggable modules: - the module should implement a class by the same name - the interface object (class iface) and the operation to be performed is
passed to the modules
- the python addon class should provide a few methods:
- run() : method to configure the interface.
- get_ops() : must return a list of operations it supports.
- eg: 'pre-up', 'post-down'
- get_dependent_ifacenames() : must return a list of interfaces the interface is dependent on. This is used to build the dependency list for sorting and executing interfaces in dependency order.
- if the module supports -r option to ifquery, ie ability to construct the
ifaceobj from running state, it can optionally implement the get_dependent_ifacenames_running() method, to return the list of dependent interfaces derived from running state of the interface. This is different from get_dependent_ifacenames() where the dependent interfaces are derived from the interfaces config file (provided by the user).
Example: Address handling module /usr/share/ifupdownaddons/address.py
get source
- install build dependencies:
apt-get install python-stdeb apt-get install python-docutils
cd <python-ifupdown2 sourcedir> && ./build.sh
(generates python-ifupdown2-<ver>.deb)
- remove existing ifupdown package dpkg -r ifupdown
- install python-ifupdown2 using dpkg -i
- or install from deb
- dpkg -i python-ifupdown2-<ver>.deb