Pyroute2 is a pure Python netlink library. The core requires only Python stdlib, no 3rd party libraries. The library was started as an RTNL protocol implementation, so the name is pyroute2, but now it supports many netlink protocols. Some supported netlink families and protocols:

rtnl , network settings — addresses, routes, traffic controls

nfnetlink — netfilter API

ipq — simplest userspace packet filtering, iptables QUEUE target

devlink — manage and monitor devlink-enabled hardware

generic — generic netlink families

uevent — same uevent messages as in udev

Netfilter API:

ipset — IP sets

nftables — packet filtering

nfct — connection tracking

Generic netlink:

ethtool — low-level network interface setup

wireguard — VPN setup

nl80211 — wireless functions API (basic support)

taskstats — extended process statistics

acpi_events — ACPI events monitoring

thermal_events — thermal events monitoring

VFS_DQUOT — disk quota events monitoring

On the low level the library provides socket objects with an extended API. The additional functionality aims to:

Help to open/bind netlink sockets

Discover generic netlink protocols and multicast groups

Construct, encode and decode netlink and PF_ROUTE messages

Supported systems¶ Pyroute2 runs natively on Linux and emulates some limited subset of RTNL netlink API on BSD systems on top of PF_ROUTE notifications and standard system tools. Other platforms are not supported.

NDB – high level RTNL API¶ Key features: Data integrity

Transactions with commit/rollback changes

State synchronization

Multiple sources, including netns and remote systems A “Hello world” example: from pyroute2 import NDB ndb = NDB ( log = 'on' ) for record in ndb . interfaces . summary (): print ( record . ifname , record . address , record . state ) for record in ndb . addresses . summary (): print ( record . _as_dict ()) ( ndb . interfaces . create ( ifname = 'br0' , kind = 'bridge' ) # create a bridge . add_port ( 'eth0' ) # add ports . add_port ( 'eth1' ) # . add_ip ( '10.0.0.1/24' ) # add addresses . add_ip ( '192.168.0.1/24' ) # . set ( 'br_stp_state' , 1 ) # set STP on . set ( 'state' , 'up' ) # bring the interface up . commit ()) # commit pending changes

IPRoute – Low level RTNL API¶ Low-level IPRoute utility — Linux network configuration. The IPRoute class is a 1-to-1 RTNL mapping. There are no implicit interface lookups and so on. Get notifications about network settings changes with IPRoute: from pyroute2 import IPRoute with IPRoute () as ipr : # With IPRoute objects you have to call bind() manually ipr . bind () for message in ipr . get (): print ( message ) More examples: from socket import AF_INET from pyroute2 import IPRoute # get access to the netlink socket ip = IPRoute () # no monitoring here -- thus no bind() # print interfaces for link in ip . get_links (): print ( link ) # create VETH pair and move v0p1 to netns 'test' ip . link ( 'add' , ifname = 'v0p0' , peer = 'v0p1' , kind = 'veth' ) idx = ip . link_lookup ( ifname = 'v0p1' )[ 0 ] ip . link ( 'set' , index = idx , net_ns_fd = 'test' ) # bring v0p0 up and add an address idx = ip . link_lookup ( ifname = 'v0p0' )[ 0 ] ip . link ( 'set' , index = idx , state = 'up' ) ip . addr ( 'add' , index = idx , address = '10.0.0.1' , prefixlen = 24 ) # release Netlink socket ip . close ()

Network namespace examples¶ Network namespace manipulation: from pyroute2 import netns # create netns netns . create ( 'test' ) # list print ( netns . listnetns ()) # remove netns netns . remove ( 'test' ) Create veth interfaces pair and move to netns: from pyroute2 import IPRoute with IPRoute () as ipr : # create interface pair ipr . link ( 'add' , ifname = 'v0p0' , kind = 'veth' , peer = 'v0p1' ) # lookup the peer index idx = ipr . link_lookup ( ifname = 'v0p1' )[ 0 ] # move the peer to the 'test' netns: ipr . link ( 'set' , index = 'v0p1' , net_ns_fd = 'test' ) List interfaces in some netns: from pyroute2 import NetNS from pprint import pprint ns = NetNS ( 'test' ) pprint ( ns . get_links ()) ns . close () More details and samples see in the documentation.

Installation¶ make install or pip install pyroute2