Install bgpstream with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• bgpreader
• parsebgp

Project history

CAIDA describes BGPStream as an open-source software framework for live and historical BGP data analysis, supporting scientific research, operational monitoring, and post-event analysis. Its architecture is split into data-access, record extraction and packaging, and record-processing layers, with libBGPStream as the core library.

The upstream changelog records version 1.0.0 as the initial public release on 2015-10-26, followed by version 1.1.0 on 2016-01-28 with native community support, proof-of-concept filters for peers/prefixes/communities, broker resilience, utility structures including a patricia tree, and BGPCorsaro AS-monitor work. GitHub tags show the 2.x line reaching v2.0.0 in 2020 and v2.3.0 in 2024.

Adoption history

BGPStream's adoption is research-infrastructure flavored: CAIDA hosts the documentation, data-provider information, publications, APIs, tutorials, and download surface, while the GitHub repository provides the source and accepts pull requests. The package-manager footprint in this input is Homebrew-only, but upstream documents Ubuntu/Debian, FreeBSD, macOS, CentOS, Arch Linux, and generic Unix installation paths.

How it is used

Users can consume BGP data through the bgpreader CLI, libBGPStream C/C++ API, PyBGPStream bindings, and metadata/data-access components. Typical uses include replaying historical routing data over a time window, monitoring real-time data, developing Python analyses, or building high-performance C/C++ routing-data pipelines.

Why package nerds care

BGPStream is important to package nerds because it turns Internet-scale routing telemetry into a locally installable library and CLI instead of a pile of collector-specific dump-fetch scripts. Packaging it makes serious BGP forensics possible from a laptop or lab machine: install the formula, run bgpreader or link libBGPStream, and query RouteViews/RIS-style measurement data through a consistent API.

For network operators and researchers, the package is also a reproducibility tool. Historical BGP incidents, hijack investigations, outage postmortems, and measurement papers need exact time-window replay and consistent parsing; BGPStream provides the common substrate for that work.

Timeline

• 2014: The libBGPStream repository history begins.
• 2015: Version 1.0.0 is recorded as the initial public release.
• 2016: Version 1.1.0 adds native community support and early peer/prefix/community filters.
• 2020: The v2.0.0 tag lands in the GitHub repository.
• 2024: The v2.3.0 tag is recorded in the GitHub repository.

Related projects

• The framework includes libBGPStream, BGPReader, PyBGPStream, the broker/metadata API, and integrations around libparsebgp and BGPCorsaro. Its data-access role connects it to public BGP measurement infrastructures such as RouteViews and RIPE RIS through CAIDA's supported data-provider interfaces.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/CAIDA/libbgpstream
• https://bgpstream.caida.org/
• https://bgpstream.caida.org/docs
• https://bgpstream.caida.org/docs/api/libbgpstream
• https://bgpstream.caida.org/docs/install/bgpstream
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CAIDA/libbgpstream/master/ChangeLog