Labtris. An open network lab you talk to.
Self-hosted emulator for network, security and DevOps engineers. Real containers, real virtual machines, real Linux networking — wired on a canvas in your browser, or built for you by an LLM you plug in. No node cap, no licence server, no account required.
# on a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 host
curl -fsSL https://labtris.com/install | sudo bashReads get.sh. Idempotent — re-run to upgrade.
Point Claude at your lab. Watch it build the network.
Labtris ships a first-class MCP server and a browser assistant that turn plain-English intent into topology and configuration. Ask for a three-tier Clos with four spines and eight leaves — the LLM drops the nodes, draws the wires, and drives OSPF up. Ask why a ping fails — it reads the interfaces, tails the logs, and tells you.
- Any provider. OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq, a local Ollama — all the same box.
- Any client. Chat pane in the browser, or point Claude Code / Cursor / your own MCP client at the same tools.
- Your keys stay yours. The browser talks to your provider directly. Labtris never sees the key.
- Bounded by ownership. Tools run as the signed-in user. Nothing the assistant can do exceeds what a human can do by hand.
Built to save my own time. Turned out to be useful.
I run a lab network at home and at work. Deploying a change by hand and troubleshooting it after is where the hours disappear — so I built a place where an LLM (Claude, or anything else I plug in) can drive the topology directly and I only intervene when it gets stuck. It works well enough that other people started asking for it.
So it stays free. Apache-2.0, no telemetry, no account, no upsell page waiting behind a feature flag. If enough of us use it, maybe it becomes the shared piece of infrastructure the networking community never had.
Everything a network lab needs.
Wire nodes on a canvas, boot them, console in, capture packets, impair a link — from the browser, over kernel networking that actually behaves like a network.
Real nodes, real kernel
Docker containers and QEMU virtual machines, wired with veth pairs and Linux bridges. What you learn transfers because nothing is simulated.
Canvas + wiring
Drag nodes, drag from a port to a target, done. Wires are first-class — per-link impairment and per-direction latency come from that.
Consoles that work
Serial from QEMU's real port, container shells over a real PTY, VNC and RDP through Guacamole for graphical guests. Copy/paste, resize, colours.
netem per direction
Delay, jitter, loss, reorder, rate — applied to each direction of a link independently. Real 200 ms one-way asymmetry, not a symmetric fake.
Networks that count
Internal bridges, NAT with DHCP + reservations, cloud onto a host NIC, VXLAN across hosts. VLAN filtering with real access + trunk ports.
Wireshark in the browser
Start a capture on any interface, filter with BPF at capture time, watch packets in a real dissector in your browser — or open the file in Wireshark itself.
Bring your own images
QEMU images are yours — Labtris redistributes nothing under a vendor licence. The catalogue records where each one came from so you know where to look.
Density that scales
Kernel Samepage Merging tuned in — a measured 8.5:1 dedup ratio across VMs on a real host. That's how one machine holds twenty labs, not two.
MCP-native assistant
An LLM can drive the whole thing over MCP or the REST API — tool calls run as the signed-in user with the same permissions as a human hand.
Import your topology, keep your images.
Labtris imports the formats you already have and runs the same vendor images you already downloaded. Migration guides per product below.