Northbound gRPC

gRPC provides a combined front end to all FRR daemons using the YANG northbound. It is currently disabled by default due its experimental stage, but it can be enabled with --enable-grpc option in the configure script.

Northbound gRPC Features

  • Get/set configuration using JSON/XML/XPath encondings.

  • Execute YANG RPC calls.

  • Lock/unlock configuration.

  • Create/edit/load/update/commit candidate configuration.

  • List/get transactions.

Note

There is currently no support for YANG notifications.

Note

You can find more information on how to code programs to interact with FRR by reading the gRPC Programming Language Bindings section in the developer’s documentation.

Daemon gRPC Configuration

The gRPC module accepts the following run time option:

  • port: the port to listen to (defaults to 50051).

Note

At the moment only localhost connections with no SSL/TLS are supported.

To configure FRR daemons to listen to gRPC you need to append the following parameter to the daemon’s command line: -M grpc (optionally -M grpc:PORT to specify listening port).

To do that in production you need to edit the /etc/frr/daemons file so the daemons get started with the command line argument. Example:

# other daemons...
bfdd_options="  --daemon -A 127.0.0.1 -M grpc"