Installation

Getting started with Routinator is really easy either building from Cargo or running with Docker. Alternatively, GÉANT has created an Ansible playbook defining a role to deploy Routinator on Ubuntu.

Quick Start

Assuming you have a newly installed Debian or Ubuntu machine, you will need to install rsync, the C toolchain and Rust. You can then install Routinator and start it up as an RTR server listening on 127.0.0.1 port 3323 and HTTP on port 9556:

apt install rsync build-essential
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source ~/.cargo/env
cargo install routinator
routinator init
# Follow instructions provided
routinator server --rtr 192.0.2.13:3323 --http 192.0.2.13:9556

If you have an older version of Rust and Routinator, you can update via:

rustup update
cargo install -f routinator

If you want to try the master branch from the repository instead of a release version, you can run:

cargo install --git https://github.com/NLnetLabs/routinator.git

Quick Start with Docker

Due to the impracticality of complying with the ARIN TAL distribution terms in an unsupervised Docker environment, before launching the container it is necessary to first review and agree to the ARIN Relying Party Agreement (RPA). If you agree to the terms, you can let the Routinator Docker image install the TALs into a mounted volume that is later reused for the server:

# Create a Docker volume to persist TALs in
sudo docker volume create routinator-tals
# Review the ARIN terms.
# Run a disposable container to install TALs.
sudo docker run --rm -v routinator-tals:/home/routinator/.rpki-cache/tals \
    nlnetlabs/routinator init -f --accept-arin-rpa
# Launch the final detached container named 'routinator' exposing RTR on
# port 3323 and HTTP on port 9556
sudo docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped --name routinator -p 3323:3323 \
     -p 9556:9556 -v routinator-tals:/home/routinator/.rpki-cache/tals \
     nlnetlabs/routinator

System Requirements

At this time, the size of the global RPKI data set is about 500MB. Cryptographic validation of it takes Routinator about 2 seconds on a quad-core i7.

When choosing a system to run Routinator on, make sure you have 1GB of available memory and 1GB of disk space. This will give you ample margin for the RPKI repositories to grow over time, as adoption increases.

Getting Started

There are three things you need to install and run Routinator: rsync, a C toolchain and Rust. You can install Routinator on any system where you can fulfil these requirements.

You need rsync because most RPKI repositories currently use it as its main means of distribution. Some of the cryptographic primitives used by Routinator require a C toolchain. Lastly, you need Rust because that’s the programming language that Routinator has been written in.

rsync

Currently, Routinator requires the rsync executable to be in your path. Due to the nature of rsync, it is unclear which particular version you need at the very least, but whatever is being shipped with current Linux and *BSD distributions and macOS should be fine. Alternatively, you can download rsync from its website.

On Windows, Routinator requires the rsync version that comes with Cygwin – make sure to select rsync during the installation phase.

C Toolchain

Some of the libraries Routinator depends on require a C toolchain to be present. Your system probably has some easy way to install the minimum set of packages to build from C sources. For example, apt install build-essential will install everything you need on Debian/Ubuntu.

If you are unsure, try to run cc on a command line and if there’s a complaint about missing input files, you are probably good to go.

Rust

The Rust compiler runs on, and compiles to, a great number of platforms, though not all of them are equally supported. The official Rust Platform Support page provides an overview of the various support levels.

While some system distributions include Rust as system packages, Routinator relies on a relatively new version of Rust, currently 1.34 or newer. We therefore suggest to use the canonical Rust installation via a tool called rustup.

To install rustup and Rust, simply do:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Alternatively, visit the official Rust website for other installation methods.

You can update your Rust installation later by running:

rustup update

For some platforms, rustup cannot provide binary releases to install directly. The Rust Platform Support page lists several platforms where official binary releases are not available, but Rust is still guaranteed to build. For these platforms, automated tests are not run so it’s not guaranteed to produce a working build, but they often work to quite a good degree.

One such example that is especially relevant for the routing community is OpenBSD. On this platform, patches are required to get Rust running correctly, but these are well maintained and offer the latest version of Rust quite quickly.

Rust can be installed on OpenBSD by running:

pkg_add rust

Another example where the standard installation method does not work is CentOS 6, where you will end up with a long list of error messages about missing assembler instructions. This is because the assembler shipped with CentOS 6 is too old.

You can get the necessary version by installing the Developer Toolset 6 from the Software Collections repository. On a virgin system, you can install Rust using these steps:

sudo yum install centos-release-scl
sudo yum install devtoolset-6
scl enable devtoolset-6 bash
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
source $HOME/.cargo/env

Building

The easiest way to get Routinator is to leave it to cargo by saying:

cargo install routinator

If you want to try the master branch from the repository instead of a release version, you can run:

cargo install --git https://github.com/NLnetLabs/routinator.git

If you want to update an installed version, you run the same command but add the -f flag, a.k.a. force, to approve overwriting the installed version.

The command will build Routinator and install it in the same directory that cargo itself lives in, likely $HOME/.cargo/bin. This means Routinator will be in your path, too.

Building a Statically Linked Routinator

While Rust binaries are mostly statically linked, they depend on libc which, as least as glibc that is standard on Linux systems, is somewhat difficult to link statically. This is why Routinator binaries are actually dynamically linked on glibc systems and can only be transferred between systems with the same glibc versions.

However, Rust can build binaries based on the alternative implementation named musl that can easily be statically linked. Building such binaries is easy with rustup. You need to install musl and the correct musl target such as x86_64-unknown-linux-musl for x86_64 Linux systems. Then you can just build Routinator for that target.

On a Debian (and presumably Ubuntu) system, enter the following:

sudo apt-get install musl-tools
rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
cargo build --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl --release