Using exaBGP to control your routers

ExaBGP is a python implementation of the BGP protocol. You can run exaBGP on the server and establish BGP sessions to your routers. You can find the exaBGP source on the github.

https://github.com/Exa-Networks/exabgp

What you can do with it? You can for example use it to monitor the state of your network or to manipulate routes. You can find many use cases on the following link:

https://github.com/Exa-Networks/exabgp/wiki/Related-articles

To install exaBGP on your server use python pip.

pip install exabgp

The advantage of exaBGP is that it is very programmable. It transform BGP messages to text or JSON files. You can communicate with exaBGP with the API. To send commands to the exaBGP write these commands to STDOUT. To receive the data read the STDIN.

To begin with the exaBGP you need a configuration file. The configuration file specify the basic BGP settings for the server and basic neighbor settings. The example of the file is:

neighbor 192.168.1.1 {
    router-id 192.168.1.2;
    local-address 192.168.1.2;
    local-as 1;
    peer-as 1;
    graceful-restart;

    process routes {
        run ./routes.py
    }
}

With the neighbor command you specify the IP address of the neighbor. Inside the neighbor configuration you specify the router-id of the server, the IP address, which will be used by the server, local and remote AS number (you can use iBGP or eBGP session). The process command is mandatory. With process command you specify which external script will exaBGP run. You can run any script you want. You can use this script to write to the STDOUT, which will be captured by exaBGP and use this command to execute some tasks. You can run multiple scripts by using multiple process commands.

The example of the routes.py is:

import sys
import time

routes = [
'announce route 1.1.1.1/32 next-hop 192.168.1.10',
]

time.sleep(1)

for route in routes:
    sys.stdout.write(route + '\n')
    sys.stdout.flush()
    time.sleep(1)

while True:
    time.sleep(1)

The exaBGP will execute this script and this script will write the ‘announce …’ command to the STDOUT. This command will tell the exaBGP to announce this route to the BGP peer. And if you check your router after announcing this route, you can see this route in the BGP table.

You can also construct your configuration with the group parameters:

group DEMO {
    router-id 192.168.1.2;
    local-address 192.168.1.2;
    graceful-restart;

    neighbor 192.168.1.10 {
        local-as 65010;
        peer-as 65010;
    }

    neighbor 192.168.1.11 {
        local-as 65011;
        peer-as 65011;
    }

    process routes {
         run ./routes.py;
    }
}

As you can see, you can use different AS numbers on the BGP server. That is really the advantage of using exaBGP.

To run an exaBGP server use the following command:

exabgp demo.conf

This command will run the server and establish the BGP sessions with your routers.

ExaBGP is a great tool, if you want to have the programmable BGP implementation. The only thing that I am missing is the lack of documentation, and examples.