birdwatcher

healthchecker for BIRD-anycasted services

⚠️ NOTE: this version of birdwatcher is designed to work with BIRD version 2 and up. If you want to use birdwatcher with BIRD 1.x, refer to the bird1 branch.

This project is heavily influenced by anycast-healthchecker. If you want to know more about use cases of birdwatcher, please read their excellent documentation about anycasted services and how a healthchecker can contribute to a more stable service availability.

In a nutshell: birdwatcher periodically checks a specific service and tells BIRD which prefixes to announce or to withdraw when the service appears to be up or down respectively.

Why birdwatcher

When I found out about anycast-healthchecker on HaproxyConf 2019, I figured this would solve the missing link between BIRD and whatever anycasted services I had running (mostly haproxy though). Currently however in anycast-healthchecker, it is not possible to specify multiple prefixes to a service. Some machines in these kind of setups are announcing many /32 and /128 prefixes and I ended up specifying so many services (one per prefix) that python crashed giving me a too many open files error. At first I tried to patch anycast-healthchecker but ended up writing something similar, hence birdwatcher.

It is written in Go because I like it and running multiple threads is easy.

Upgrading

Upgrading from 1.0.0-beta2 to 1.0.0-beta3

The notation of timeout for services changed from int (for number of seconds) to the format time.ParseDuration uses, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m".

For example: 10 should become "10s" in your config files.

Example usage

This simple example configures a single service, runs haproxy_check.sh every second and manages one prefix based on the exit code of the script:

[services]
  [services."foo"]
  command = "/usr/bin/haproxy_check.sh"
  prefixes = ["192.168.0.0/24"]

Sample output in /etc/bird/birdwatcher.conf if haproxy_check.sh checks out would be:

# DO NOT EDIT MANUALLY
function match_route() -> bool
{
	return net ~ [
		192.168.0.0/24
	];
}

As soon as birdwatcher finds out haproxy is down, it will change the content in /etc/bird/birdwatcher.conf to:

# DO NOT EDIT MANUALLY
function match_route() -> bool
{
	return false;
}

and reconfigures BIRD by given reloadcommand. Obviously, if you have multiple services being checked by birdwatcher, only the prefixes of that particular service would be removed from the list in match_route.

Multiple prefixes (IPv4 + IPv6)

When announcing both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes, you must split them into separate services with different function names. BIRD does not allow mixed IPv4/IPv6 prefixes in a single BGP protocol block, so birdwatcher generates separate functions for each address family:

[services]
  # IPv4-only service
  [services."haproxy-4"]
  command = "/usr/bin/haproxy_check.sh"
  prefixes = ["10.0.0.1/32"]

  # IPv6-only service (note the different functionname!)
  [services."haproxy-6"]
  command = "/usr/bin/haproxy_check.sh"
  functionname = "match_route_ipv6"
  prefixes = ["fd00::1/128"]

This generates two separate functions in /etc/bird/birdwatcher.conf:

# DO NOT EDIT MANUALLY
function match_route() -> bool
{
	return net ~ [
		10.0.0.1/32
	];
}
function match_route_ipv6() -> bool
{
	return net ~ [
		fd00::1/128
	];
}

In BIRD, use the corresponding function in each address family's protocol block:

include "/etc/bird/birdwatcher.conf";

protocol bgp my_bgp_v4 {
  local as 12345;
  neighbor 1.2.3.4 as 23435;
  ...
  ipv4 {
    ...
    export where match_route();
  }
}

protocol bgp my_bgp_v6 {
  local as 12345;
  neighbor 1.2.3.4 as 23435;
  ...
  ipv6 {
    ...
    export where match_route_ipv6();
  }
}

Important:

• Each service must contain only IPv4 or only IPv6 prefixes
• Each service needs a unique functionname (defaults to match_route)
• The generated function name must match the one referenced in your BIRD export where filter
• Place include "/etc/bird/birdwatcher.conf"; at the top of your bird.conf — before any protocol definitions that reference the functions

Command-line flags

flag	description
-config	Path to birdwatcher's own TOML config file. Defaults to /etc/birdwatcher.conf.
-check-config	Validate the config file and exit. Combine with -debug to also dump the parsed config as JSON.
-debug	Increase the log level to debug.
-systemd	Optimize behavior for running under systemd: drop log timestamps (journald adds its own) and send sd_notify readiness, status and stopping updates.
-version	Print the version and exit.

Note the two distinct paths: the -config flag points to birdwatcher's own TOML config (default /etc/birdwatcher.conf), while the configfile key inside that config is the BIRD prefix file birdwatcher generates (default /etc/bird/birdwatcher.conf).

For example, to validate a config file without starting birdwatcher:

birdwatcher -check-config -config /etc/birdwatcher.conf

Configuration

global

Configuration section for global options.

key	description
configfile	Path to configuration file that will be generated and should be included in the BIRD configuration. Defaults to /etc/bird/birdwatcher.conf.
reloadcommand	Command to invoke to signal BIRD the configuration should be reloaded. Defaults to /usr/sbin/birdc configure.
compatbird213	To use birdwatcher with BIRD 2.13 or earlier, enable this flag. It will remove the function return types from the output

[services]

Each service under this section can have the following settings:

key	description
command	Command that will be periodically run to check if the service should be considered up or down. The result is based on the exit code: a non-zero exit codes makes birdwatcher decide the service is down, otherwise it's up. Required
functionname	Specify the name of the function birdwatcher will generate. You can use this function name to use in your protocol export filter in BIRD. Defaults to match_route.
interval	The interval in seconds at which birdwatcher will check the service. Defaults to 1
timeout	Time in which the check command should complete. Afterwards it will be handled as if the check command failed. Defaults to 10s, format following that of time.ParseDuration.
fail	The amount of times the check command should fail before the service is considered to be down. Defaults to 1
rise	The amount of times the check command should succeed before the service is considered to be up. Defaults to 1
prefixes	Array of prefixes, mixed IPv4 and IPv6. At least 1 prefix is required per service

[prometheus]

Configuration for the prometheus exporter

key	description
enabled	Boolean whether you want to export prometheus metrics. Defaults to false
port	Port to export prometheus metrics on. Defaults to 9091
path	Path to the prometheus metrics. Defaults to /metrics

Testing

The regular unit tests run with:

go test ./...

End-to-end tests

The e2e/ package contains an end-to-end test that exercises the full loop: it spins up a real BIRD instance in a container (via testcontainers-go), runs a real birdwatcher binary against it, and verifies through birdc that prefixes are announced and withdrawn as the service health changes.

Because it launches containers, it is guarded behind the e2e build tag and is not part of go test ./.... To run it you need a working Docker daemon (Docker Desktop, Colima, or a native Docker Engine):

go test -tags e2e -v -timeout 600s ./e2e/...

The test builds the birdwatcher binary itself, so no separate build step is required. It automatically disables the testcontainers Ryuk reaper (TESTCONTAINERS_RYUK_DISABLED=true), which works around issues with non-standard Docker socket paths; containers are still cleaned up when the test finishes.

On macOS with Colima, note that only your home directory is mounted into the Docker VM by default. The test accounts for this by creating its temporary working directory under your home directory rather than /tmp.

This is the same command the CI e2e job runs (see .github/workflows/go.yml).