Table of Contents

Introduction

Floodlight comes equipped with a web-based GUI exposed through the controller's REST API. Every shiny feature flaunted by the GUI uses a vanilla REST API under the hood. If you'd like to build an application that utilizes information provided by the GUI, you can programmatically access specific underlying REST APIs, which are documented here.

Some GUI Features

The Floodlight GUI is not only an easy way to get started using the controller, but it is also a handy debugging tool. The Floodlight GUI provides a way for users to view controller state information, connected switches, inter-switch links, devices/hosts on the network, flows installed in switch flow tables, and the overall network topology. Most OpenFlow statistics can be queried using the web GUI and are displayed in an easy-to-read, tabular fashion.

The GUI provides read and write access to the controller, meaning it allows one to modify the network state in addition to query it. For example, the Static Flow Pusher module has a GUI front end for easy flow insertion. Other controller modules and features are also exposed in the Floodlight GUI. See below on how to access the GUI and explore all the features for yourself.

How to Access the GUI

The GUI can be accessed by pointing your favorite browser to the following URL:

http://<controller-ip>:8080/ui/index.html

where <controller-ip> is the IP address or hostname of the machine running your controller. This is oftentimes localhost or 127.0.0.1 if you are running the controller on the same machine as you will use to access the GUI.