2. interface Lua Object

A Lua script is associated with a network interface, called active interface. All the interface methods are referred to the active interface. By calling interface.select() it’s possible to change the current active interface of the script.

For example, in order to extract local hosts information for interface eth0, the following snippet would be used:

interface.select("eth0")

-- working on eth0 from now on

local res = interface.getLocalHostsInfo()
-- tprint(res)

• 2.1. Hosts API
• 2.2. Flows API
• 2.3. Misc API
• 2.4. MACs API
• 2.5. nDPI API
• 2.6. Dump API

Rather than using the interface API directly, one can use Lua wrappers to process hosts, flows and other elements in batches. Processing in batches has the benefit of reduced memory footprint and thus it may be absolutely necessary when working in large environments.

For example, to visit all the active flows in batches using the Lua wrapper, the following snippet of code can be used:

local count = 0

callback_utils.foreachFlow("eno1", os.time() + 10,
  function(flow_num, flow)
    count = count + 1
    return true -- continue
  end
)

io.write("total flows: "..count.."\n")

The full list of wrappers is available at https://github.com/ntop/ntopng/blob/dev/scripts/lua/modules/callback_utils.lua