Development Environment

Prerequisites

Before getting started you will need the Rust stable and nightly toolchains installed on your system. This is easily achieved with rustup:

rustup install stable
rustup toolchain install nightly --component rust-src

Once you have the Rust toolchains installed, you must also install bpf-linker. Because the required LLVM version and platform-specific steps change over time, follow the installation instructions in the bpf-linker README.

To generate the scaffolding for your project, you’re going to need cargo-generate, which you can install following these instructions.

And finally to generate bindings for kernel data structures, you must install bpftool, either from your distribution or building it from source.

Warning

If you’re running on Ubuntu 20.04, there is a bug with bpftool and the default kernel installed by the distribution. To avoid running into it, you can install a newer bpftool version that does not include the bug with:

sudo apt install linux-tools-5.8.0-63-generic
export PATH=/usr/lib/linux-tools/5.8.0-63-generic:$PATH

Starting A New Project

To start a new project, you can use cargo-generate:

cargo generate https://github.com/aya-rs/aya-template

This will prompt you for a project name - we’ll be using myapp in this example. It will also prompt you for a program type and possibly other options depending on the chosen type (for example, the attach direction for network classifiers).

If you prefer, you can set template options directly from the command line, eg:

cargo generate --name myapp -d program_type=xdp https://github.com/aya-rs/aya-template

See the cargo-generate.toml file (in the aya-template repository) for the full list of available options.