# BIRD Internet Routing Daemon

* Table of Contents
{:toc}

## Overview

The [BIRD Internet Routing Daemon](https://bird.network.cz/) is a routing daemon; i.e., a software responsible for managing kernel packet forwarding tables. It aims to develop a dynamic IP routing daemon with full support of all modern routing protocols, easy to use configuration interface and powerful route filtering language, primarily targeted on (but not limited to) Linux and other UNIX-like systems and distributed under the GNU General Public License. BIRD has a free implementation of several well known and common routing and router-supplemental protocols, namely RIP, RIPng, OSPFv2, OSPFv3, BGP, BFD, and NDP/RA. BIRD supports IPv4 and IPv6 address families, Linux kernel and several BSD variants (tested on FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD). BIRD consists of bird daemon and birdc interactive CLI client used for supervision.

In order to be able to use the BIRD Internet Routing Protocol, you must first install the project on your machine.

## BIRD Package Install

```shell
sudo apt-get install bird
```

## BIRD Source Code Install

You can download BIRD source code from it's [official repository.](https://gitlab.labs.nic.cz/labs/bird/)
```shell
./configure
make
su
make install
vi /etc/bird/bird.conf
```
The installation will place the bird directory inside */etc* where you will also find its config file.

In order to be able to do use the Bird Internet Routing Protocol, you must modify *bird.conf* due to the fact that the given configuration file is not configured beyond allowing the bird daemon to start, which means that nothing else will happen if you run it. Keeran Marquis has a very detailed example on [Configuring BGP using Bird on Ubuntu](https://blog.marquis.co/configuring-bgp-using-bird-on-ubuntu-14-04lts/) which can be used as a building block to implement your custom routing daemon.