How to control ExaBGP from external tool?

Please setup ExaBGP and Quagga before this manual.

Let’s create fake process which work as proxy for relying data from Linux PIPE to ExaBGP:

vim /etc/exabgp/exabgp_pipe_provider.sh

With this contents:

#!/bin/sh

FIFO="/var/run/exabgp.cmd"
#trap "rm -f $FIFO" SIGINT

rm -f $FIFO
mkfifo $FIFO
tail -f $FIFO

Set exec flag:

chmod +x /etc/exabgp/exabgp_pipe_provider.sh

And add following (process service-dynamic ….) to ExaBGP config: /etc/exabgp_blackhole.conf

group Core_v4 {
    hold-time 180;
    local-as 65001;
    peer-as 1234;
    router-id 10.0.3.114;
    graceful-restart 1200;

    static {
        route 10.10.10.1/32 next-hop 10.0.3.114 community 65001:666;
    }   

    neighbor 10.0.3.115 {
        local-address 10.0.3.114;
        description "Quagga";
    }   

    # Add this line for process management
    process service-dynamic {
        run /etc/exabgp/exabgp_pipe_provider.sh;
    }   
}

And run ExaBGP!

After this we could see multiple processes in process list:

ps aux|grep exa
root     36854  0.0  0.0  52764 14604 ?        S    11:47   0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin/exabgp /etc/exabgp_blackhole.conf
root     36855  0.0  0.0   4328   868 ?        S    11:47   0:00 /bin/sh /etc/exabgp/exabgp_pipe_provider.sh
root     36858  0.0  0.0   5800  1324 ?        S    11:47   0:00 tail -f /var/run/exabgp.cmd

We are ready!

Let’s add announce:

echo "announce route 10.10.10.123/32 next-hop 10.0.3.114 community 65001:666" > /var/run/exabgp.cmd

If you want to disable it please use this syntax:

echo "withdraw route 10.10.10.123/32" > /var/run/exabgp.cmd

After announce route we could see on Quagga side new prefix:

*> 10.10.10.123/32  10.0.3.114                             0 65001 i