bgpipe: BGP pipeline processor

An open-source tool that processes BGP messages through a pipeline of composable stages, built on the bgpfix library.

Full documentation at bgpipe.org

What is bgpipe?

bgpipe sits between routers as a transparent proxy, auditing, filtering, and transforming BGP sessions on the fly. Think of it as a scriptable BGP firewall and traffic processor.

Use cases:

• BGP firewall with RPKI ROV and ASPA route-leak detection, prefix limits, and rate limiting
• Route policy on the wire - prepend, strip private ASNs, scrub communities, set MED / LOCAL_PREF
• Bidirectional BGP to JSON translation including Flowspec - pipe through jq, Python, anything
• MRT file processing and conversion at scale, incl. RIB snapshots (table dumps)
• Scriptable pipeline - chain stages or pipe through external programs, keep it in a config file
• Live BGP monitoring from RIPE RIS Live or RouteViews with real-time filters
• Secure transport - add TCP-MD5 to sessions, proxy over encrypted WebSockets

• ~1M BGP messages/s from MRT to JSON on one box; UPDATE parsing takes ~175 ns with zero allocations (bgpfix v0.23)
• all parsers are fuzzed, and malformed input from a peer or a public feed can't crash the process
• safe defaults: listen --peer allow-lists, authenticated WebSocket servers, slow clients can't stall a session, RPKI data over HTTPS

Quick Example

# Reverse proxy: expose internal BGP router to one peer, log all traffic to JSON
bgpipe --stdout \
  -- listen --peer 198.51.100.7 :179 \
  -- connect --wait listen 192.0.2.1
Stream MRT file, filter by matching IP prefix, and store as JSON file
bgpipe \
  -- read https://data.ris.ripe.net/rrc01/2025.11/updates.20251107.2300.gz \
  -- grep 'prefix ~ 198.41.0.4' \
  -- write output.json

Installation

Docker (fastest):

docker pull ghcr.io/bgpfix/bgpipe:latest
docker run --rm ghcr.io/bgpfix/bgpipe:latest --help

Binary: download from GitHub Releases.

Go: go install github.com/bgpfix/bgpipe@latest

Run bgpipe -h or bgpipe -h for built-in help.

Documentation

Visit bgpipe.org for:

• Quick start guide
• Examples and tutorials
• Filter reference
• Complete stage documentation

Contributing

• Report bugs and request features on GitHub Issues
• For collaboration inquiries, contact [email protected]
• Integration tests against real BGP daemons (GoBGP, BIRD, FRR, StayRTR, rtrtr) live in test/integration

Author

Pawel Foremski @pforemski 2023-2026