Lua API

The ntopng core provides a LuaAPI to interact with it. The API is internally used by periodic scripts and GUI scripts to extract information or to apply configuration changes.

Custom checks can use the API, for example, to provide new data visualizations or extract the data to send it to an external program.

Since some API functions can return very complex objects, which will not be covered here, the suggestion is to use the utility function tprint to print out the result a the function to figure out its format.

The Lua C API consists of two main objects:

  • the ntop object is used to access global ntopng functions, which are not bound to a specific network interface.
  • the interface object is used to access a specific network interface functions.

For example, the flows information is a network interface specific information, so it’s available through the interface object API via interface.getFlowsInfo().