ExaBGP on Ubuntu 24.04 by cloudimg

ExaBGP on Ubuntu 24.04 by cloudimg

ExaBGP is the Python "BGP swiss army knife" from Exa Networks. Rather than a traditional routing stack, it lets software talk BGP: it runs as a daemon driven by a plain text configuration, announces and withdraws routes on command through a named pipe CLI, and streams every BGP event it receives as JSON to helper processes you write in any language. That makes it the tool of choice for injecting routes from scripts and controllers, steering or blackholing traffic during DDoS mitigation, announcing anycast service addresses with health checks, and prototyping BGP behaviour including FlowSpec.

This cloudimg image ships ExaBGP 5.0.9 pinned to the official upstream release and verified by SHA-256, installed in a dedicated Python virtual environment with zero external dependencies. Because a bare BGP daemon has nothing to show on its own, the image boots into a complete, self-contained reference deployment: a primary ExaBGP (AS 65001) you drive with the CLI, peered over an internal loopback link with a demo peer (AS 65002) whose listener is bound to a non-routable address. The session authenticates with TCP-MD5, reaches established on first boot, static routes propagate in both directions, and one announce command later you can watch your own route arrive at the peer in its JSON event log.

Secure by default: no port is open on the public interface at all, both daemons run as an unprivileged system account under systemd hardening, and the only secret on the appliance, the TCP-MD5 session key, is generated uniquely on first boot and stored readable by root alone. Nothing usable is baked into the image.

Every deployment ships fully patched with unattended security updates enabled, a paired step-by-step deploy guide, and 24/7 cloudimg support.