Validating an Existing Curriculum

One of the things syrctl can do for us is validate lesson content to make sure it has all of the basics to work properly. This is done via the sub-command syrctl validate. This command is directed at a curriculum directory in order to work: for instance, we have the NRE Labs curriculum installed locally:

~$ ls -lha
total 68K
drwxr-xr-x  6 mierdin mierdin 4.0K Apr 21 22:52 .
drwxr-xr-x 10 mierdin mierdin 4.0K Apr 15 23:19 ..
drwxrwxr-x  3 mierdin mierdin 4.0K Apr 17 17:39 collections
drwxr-xr-x  8 mierdin mierdin 4.0K Apr 23 21:27 .git
drwxr-xr-x 18 mierdin mierdin 4.0K Apr  6 12:49 images
drwxr-xr-x  5 mierdin mierdin 4.0K Apr 21 22:52 lessons
-rw-r--r--  1 mierdin mierdin 5.2K Apr 21 22:54 CHANGELOG.md
-rwxr-xr-x  1 mierdin mierdin  500 Apr 15 15:19 check-changelog.sh
-rw-rw-r--  1 mierdin mierdin    0 Apr 21 13:04 curriculum.meta.yaml
-rw-r--r--  1 mierdin mierdin   33 Apr  6 12:49 .dockerignore
-rw-r--r--  1 mierdin mierdin  573 Apr  6 12:49 .gitignore
-rw-r--r--  1 mierdin mierdin  12K Apr  6 12:49 LICENSE
-rw-r--r--  1 mierdin mierdin 1.1K Apr 15 18:56 README.md
-rw-r--r--  1 mierdin mierdin  288 Apr  6 12:49 .travis.yml
-rwxr-xr-x  1 mierdin mierdin  288 Apr 15 15:19 validate-lessons.share

We're already cd'd into this directory, so we just need to run syrctl validate . to instruct syrctl to validate the local directory:

~$ syrctl validate .
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 14: Introduction to YAML --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 0, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 16: Using Jinja for Configuration Templates --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 0, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 17: Version Control with Git --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 0, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 19: Working with REST APIs --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 3, CONNECTIONS: 4 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 22: Introduction to Python --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 0, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 23: Linux Basics --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 0, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 12: Network Unit Testing with JSNAPY --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 3, CONNECTIONS: 3 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 13: Multi-Vendor Network Automation with NAPALM --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 1, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 15: Event-Driven Network Automation with StackStorm --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 3, CONNECTIONS: 3 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 18: End-to-End Network Testing with ToDD --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 2, DEVICE: 1, CONNECTIONS: 2 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 24: Junos Automation with PyEZ --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 1, CONNECTIONS: 1 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 25: Juniper Extension Toolkit (JET) --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 1, CONNECTIONS: 1 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 26: Vendor-Neutral Network Configuration with OpenConfig --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 1, CONNECTIONS: 1 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 29: Using Robot Framework for Automated Testing --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 1, CONNECTIONS: 1 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 30: Network Automation with Salt --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 1, CONNECTIONS: 1 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 31: Terraform & Junos --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 3, CONNECTIONS: 3 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 21: Automating the Troubleshooting Chain --- BLACKBOX: 2, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 2, DEVICE: 3, CONNECTIONS: 6 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 32: Automated STIG Compliance Validation --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 1, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 33: Quick and Easy Device Inventory --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 2, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 34: Automated Device Configuration Backup --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 2, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Successfully imported lesson 35: Device Specific Template Generation --- BLACKBOX: 0, IFR: 0, UTILITY: 1, DEVICE: 2, CONNECTIONS: 0 
INFO[0000] Imported 21 lesson definitions.              
All detected lesson files imported successfully.

This runs the exact same logic that syringed would use to load lessons on the server-side, so this is a really handy way to make sure the basics of curriculum definitions are done correctly.

On the NRE Labs Curriculum repository, we're actually running syrctl validate on every new Pull Request to ensure things are set up properly, as much as possible.

There are things it won't check - like the validity of a network configuration, or that your Docker image is built properly, but in terms of the things that Syringe requires, it will give you confidence in a stable starting point, rather than reading through a list of points in this doc.