I wanted to refresh my BGP knowledge, but on terms that fit how I actually work. Running a home lab with physical routers wasn't an option, and the "heavyweight" network simulators—GNS3, EVE-NG, or Cisco VIRL—felt like overkill. I didn't want to sacrifice gigabytes of RAM to spin up vendor images I'd barely use, nor did I want a steep learning curve for the simulator itself before I could even touch a BGP configuration.

Packet Tracer was light enough, but it lives entirely in a GUI. I wanted my lab to be Infrastructure-as-Code : every router defined in a flat config file I could version, diff, and rebuild from scratch in seconds.

Once it was running, I wanted a "single pane of glass" focused on what BGP was actually doing: live routing tables, communities, and best-path changes—all updating the moment a link shifted.…