NETCONF for Visual Studio Code

About

This vsCode extension implements an interactive NETCONF client, that runs against NETCONF servers, such as NOKIA 7750 Service Routers. By integrating NETCONF with Visual Studio Code, users will be able to extend the industry leading open-source code editor and integrated development environment by the ability to communicate with latest networking equipment using the NETCONF protocol.

The extension is implemented in native JavaScript/TypeScript and works on your desktop system of choice (Windows, macOS, Linux).

Build

To build this extension, you can use the Visual Studio Code Extensions command-line tool called vsce.

$ git clone https://github.com/nokia/vscode-netconf
$ cd vscode-netconf
$ npm install .
$ vsce package

To simplify installation and updates we are planning to make vscode-netconf available on Visual Studio Code Extensions Marketplace soon!

Contributions

We are happy to have people contributing to this project. If you have feature request or if you want to report misfunctions, feel free to raise Issues.

If you want to contribute code-changes, you can contribute directly via normal pull-request procedure.

Getting Started!

To use this extension, it is required to specify connection details in the extension settings.

The list of NETCONF servers must be provided in JSON format like this:

"netconf.serverList": [
	{
		"id": "admin@localhost",
		"host": "localhost",
		"port": 830,
		"username": "admin",
		"password": "admin"
	},
	{
		"id": "PE1",
		"host": "192.168.0.100",
		"port": 830,
		"username": "admin"
	}
]

All features are accessible from vsCode Command Palette. For convenience, shortcuts are provided from the statusbar (used as toolbar) and the editor title for XML files.

Supported Features

• Support for NETCONF over SSHv2

  RFC 6241 and RFC 6242 compliant NETCONF client, fully integrated with Visual Studio Code. Both *end-of-message framing and chunked-framing (base:1.0 and base:1.1) are supported.

• Authentication support: username/password and key-based

• Connection control

  The user has control when to connect/disconnect to the NETCONF server. All RPC request are send over the same NETCONF session as long the user is connected. This allows execute complex flows like lock > edit-config > validate > confirmed-commit > confirm > unlock. It's also an enabler to receive event notifications.

• Support for NETCONF event notifications

  The vscode-netconf extension is RFC 5277 compliant to receive NETCONF event notifications. Events will be buffered and while the status-bar shows the number of received events. By clicking on the events icon in the status-bar, a new TextDocument containing the buffered notifications will be opened and the buffer gets cleared.

• Examples library

  NETCONF request examples are available from https://github.com/nokia/netconf-examples and can be added to the vscode workspace from the status-bar.

  By default, the example library will be cloned to the users home directory. You can set the git.defaultCloneDirectory in the Visual Studio Code settings to an alternative folder like "~/Development" based on your personal needs.

  We are planning to have coverage for IETF, OpenConfig and vendor-models (Nokia).

• Access to server SSH greetings, SSH banner

• Access to NETCONF <hello/> messages

• Option: Prettify XML

  From the extension settings it is possible to activate the NETCONF: prettify option. This is useful, when NETCONF servers return minified XML.

• Option: SSH debug

  To troubleshoot SSHv2 related issues, like handshake problems around ciphers, and key-exchange algorithms, SSH debugging can be enabled. To check the logs, use the console-view part of Developer tools (accessible from Help).

• Option: SSH keep-alive

  Keep-alives can be enabled to automatically detect, if the underlying SSHv2 session has died.

• Status-bar icons

  The status-bar allows to pick a NETCONF server from the list of configured servers (extension settings), and to connect/disconnect to the server. If connected, the system will show how much data has been received so far from the NETCONF server.

  In addition, it is possible execute unfiltered <get/> and <get-config/> requests directly from status-bar, without the need to open the command palette.

  If the connected NETCONF server supports the candidate datastore, additional icons will appear to lock/unlock, validate, discard changes and commit the candidate datastore.

• Send RPC from Editor Title

  If an XML document is opened in a TextEditor, the Run menu will provide a shortcut to send this as request to the NETCONF server.

Compatibility

Following vendors and device families have been tested so far:

We don't mind to get access to 3rd party equipment (preferred virtual router/simulator images as virtual-machine or docker), test licenses and some basic instructions to extend the scope of our testing, improve compatibility and extend the capabilities.

Known issues

• NETCONF responses are opened as new TextDocument. Visual Studio Code is automatically setting the isDirty tag, while you can't simple close the document as the Save As dialogue will always show up.

  Related to vscode-issue #154664.

• NETCONF responses will open as Untitled TextDocument. It's not possible to provide meaningful tab-names. Ideally, we would pre-define a file:// location, that it could be saved by simply doing CTRL-S / CMD-S without Save As popup.

  Related to vscode-issue #41909.

• The vscode-netconf extension uses the API methods showInformationMessage(), showWarningMessage(), and showErrorMessage(). Messages are displayed as plain text without differentiation between message title and details and there is no possibility to show preformatted text and enforce line-breaks. In consequence, SSH banners are not displayed very nicely.

• In atom-netconf we've provided an option to enable audio feedback to improve accessibility. For an unknown reason, we've not been able to get this working using vscode. As vscode has added a feature called AudioCues in June 2022, we may need to wait until the Extensions API gets extended to allow extensions to play audio.

  Related to vscode-issue #175986.

• Under rare conditions, NETCONF-over-SSH session death is not properly propagated. SSH-level keepalive mechanism can be activated to improve session health checks. If for whatever reason the underlying session died but extension state including status-bar was not updated, you can execute Developer: Reload Window from the Visual Studio command-palette. This will enforce the restart all extensions and fixes the issue.

Feature candidates

We've captured the following feature candidates for future evolution:

• Add Host Key Validation

  By default, the ssh2 library automatically accepts any server-key. In secure environments it can be desired to implement the hostVerifier callback function, to identify the server host blocking potential man-in-the-middle attacks. The ask would be, to use the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file for validation.

  In the case the node is unknown or the host-key has changed, a pop-up dialogue would inform the user allowing to accept the new key and to update the known_hosts or to block the connection.

• Device Information

  Capturing device-level information and display to the user (Vendor, Device Family, Chassis Type, Release, CPU, Memory, Temperature, Power Consumption, Ports/Interfaces, LLDP Neighbors).

• Telemetry Support

  Add extension telemetry to collect information about how vscode-netconf is used. This is to provide better visibility about the number of active users and how this extension is used. We are planning to publish some trending regarding vendors/device-families, the industry support of IETF NETCONF features and standard YANG models (IETF, OpenConfig). In addition, we would use telemetry to improve error-handling and compatibility issues.

• Make extension YANG-aware

  Use the same concept as pysros to build a local YANG library, based on the model-set that is supported by the NETCONF server.

  Following advanced features to be supported:

  • Display model-path / xpath from cursor position
  • Model-aware conversion between XML and JSON
  • Model-aware compare between two model-instances
  • Build a edit-config request from a get-config response
  • Table-editor for YANG lists
  • Run xpath queries
  • Advanced edition using IntelliSense: Error detection, Auto-completion, Suggests, Help on Hover

• Integrated Diff

  Graphical compare of running vs candidate datastores.

Contributions are welcome, to help improving the usability of vscode-netconf.

Changes

Release 1.1.0

• Client capabilities are now configurable in the netconf.serverList. By default, vscode-netconf is sending the base:1.0 and base:1.1 capabilities to the server. By making the capabilities configurable, the desired framing mechanism can be enforced. In addition, it is possible to enable device-level feature like private candidates in Nokia SR OS.

• The execution time for RPCs is now captured and shown to the user. This is to get some initial idea on performance for a given edit-config or commit RPC. It is targeted for integrators to optimize the communication to the server and to implement response time-outs.

  The execution time is only shown to RPCs that return a simple </ok> as part of the confirmation dialogue. It's not available for RPCs that return detailed responses like <get>, <get-config. For those cases, it is shown in the console-log only.

License

This project is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause license - see the LICENSE.

Copyright (c) 2023 NOKIA