Disclaimer: This post is not about network automation for devices in a GNS3 topology. It is about automating the installation of GNS3 itself.

Have you ever wanted to try the new features of GNS3 without messing up your fine-tuned production environment where you might test changes in their production network, study for an exam, or just spent too much time setting it up and don’t want to risk ruining it? If yes, I have a solution for you.

The components of the solution are not new: we’re using VirtualBox, Vagrant, and some shell scripts to automatically set up the latest unstable GNS3 release - all of these are well known by DevOps people.

Why is it a thing then? Well, here a a few reasons:

• Testing unstable releases without messing up your existing environment.
• It saves a lot of time for those who are not GNS3 experts but want to contribute by testing new releases.
• It helps networking people to understand Vagrant and, following its logic, other CI/CD tools. Really, neither the Vagrantfile nor the shell scripts are complicated.
• Maybe it brings new contributors to the project. 😄

It should work on all platforms however I could only test it on Linux and macOS (Windows pending). Just download the latest release, issue vagrant up, and it should be available in a few minutes - if not, please leave a comment.

GitHub repo: [https://github.com/adosztal/gns3-testing] Latest version: [https://github.com/adosztal/gns3-testing/archive/v0.5.zip]