OpenR: Open Routing
Open Routing, OpenR, is Facebook's internally designed and developed routing
protocol/platform. Originally built for performing routing on the Terragraph
network, its awesome design and flexibility have led to its adoption in
other networks at Facebook including our new WAN network, Express Backbone.
Documentation
Please refer to openr/docs/Overview.md to get
started with OpenR.
Library Examples
Please refer to the examples directory to see some useful ways to
leverage the openr and fbzmq libraries to build software to run with OpenR.
Resources
- Developer Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/openr/
- Github: https://github.com/facebook/openr/
Contribute
Take a look at openr/docs/DeveloperGuide.md
and CONTRIBUTING.md to get started contributing.
The Developer Guide outlines best practices for code contribution and testing.
Any single change should be well tested for regressions and version
compatibility.
Code of Conduct
The code of conduct is described in CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
Requirements
We have tried OpenR on Ubuntu-14.04, Ubuntu-16.04 and CentOS-7.
This should work on all Linux based platforms without any issues.
- Compiler supporting C++17 or higher
- libzmq-4.0.6 or greater
Build
Repo Directory Structure
At the top level of this repo are the build and openr directories. Under the
former is a tool, fbcode_builder, that contains scripts for building the
project. The openr directory contains the source for the project.
Dependencies
If docker is not a good option for you, you can install these dependencies for your system and follow the traditional cmake build steps below.
cmakegflagsgtestlibsodiumlibzmqzstdfollyfbthriftfbzmqlibnl
One Step Build - Ubuntu-16.04
We've provided a script, build/build_openr.sh, well tested on
Ubuntu-16.04, to install all necessary dependencies, compile OpenR and install
C++ binaries as well as python tools. Please modify the script as needed for
your platform. Also, note that some library dependencies require a newer version
than provided by the default package manager on the system and hence we are
compiling them from source instead of installing via the package manager. Please
see the script for those instances and the required versions.
libnlalso requires custom patch, included herewith, for correct handling of add/remove multicast routes.
Build Steps
// Step into `build` directory
cd build
// Install dependencies and openr
sudo bash ./build_openr.sh
// Run tests (some tests requires sudo privileges)
sudo make test
If you make any changes you can run cmake ../openr and make from the build
directory to build openr with your changes.
Installing
openr builds both static and dynamic libraries and the install step installs
libraries and all header files to /usr/local/lib/ and /usr/local/include/
(under openr subdirectory) along with python modules in site-packages.
Note: the build_openr.sh script will run this step for you.
sudo make install
Installing Python Libraries
You will need python setup-tools to build and install python modules. All
library dependencies will be automatically installed except the
fbthrift-python module which you will need to install manually using steps
similar to those described below. This will install breeze, a cli tool to
interact with OpenR.
cd openr/openr/py
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install
License
OpenR is MIT licensed.

