OpenR: Open Routing

Open Routing, OpenR, is Facebook’s internally designed and developed Interior Routing Protocol/Platform. OpenR was originally designed and built for performing routing on the Terragraph mesh network. OpenR’s flexible design has led to its adoption in other networks, including Facebook’s new WAN network, Express Backbone.

Documentation

---

Please refer to our extensive Documentation to get started with OpenR.

Library Examples

---

Please refer to the examples directory to see some useful ways to leverage the libraries to build software to run with OpenR.

Resources

---

• Developer Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/openr/
• Github: https://github.com/facebook/openr/
• IRC: #openr on freenode

Contribute

---

Take a look at Developer Guide and CONTRIBUTING.md to get started contributing. The Developer Guide outlines best practices for code contribution and testing. Any single change should be well tested for regressions and version compatibility.

Code of Conduct

---

The code of conduct is described in CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Requirements

---

We have tried OpenR on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (earlier versions are no longer supported) and CentOS Stream 9. OpenR should work on all Linux based platforms.

• Compiler supporting C++20 or higher
• Python 3.10 or higher for the Breeze CLI

Build

---

Repo Directory Structure

At the top level of this repo are the build and openr directories. Under the former is a tool, gen, that contains scripts for building the project. The openr directory contains the source for the project.

Dependencies

OpenR requires these dependencies for your system and follows the traditional cmake build steps below.

• cmake
• gflags
• gtest
• libsodium
• zstd
• folly
• fbthrift
• re2-devel

One Step Build - Ubuntu

We’ve provided a script, build/build_openr.sh, tested on Ubuntu LTS releases. It uses gendeps.py to install all necessary dependencies and compile and install the OpenR C++ binaries. Please modify the script as needed for your platform. Also, note that some library dependencies require a newer version than provided by the default package manager on the system and hence we are compiling them from source instead of installing via the package manager. Please see the script for those instances and the required versions.

Build Steps

# Install dependencies and build openr
bash ./build/build_openr.sh

# To Run tests (some tests requires sudo privileges)
python3 build/fbcode_builder/getdeps.py test \
  --src-dir=. \
  --project-install-prefix openr:/opt/facebook \
  openr

If you make any changes you can run cmake ../openr and make from the build directory to build openr with your changes.

Installing

The install step installs the Open/R binaries, generated Thrift libraries, source and generated Thrift headers under /opt/facebook/openr, and Python modules in your Python’s site-packages directory. Open/R executables and tests link the granular component libraries directly; the build does not install a monolithic Open/R implementation library. Note: the build_openr.sh script will run this step for you

• Manually you can drive getdeps.py to install elsewhere
  • refer to build_openr.sh

Installing Python Libraries + CLI

The Docker build runs build/build_breeze.sh to generate modern Thrift Python bindings, install their matching fbthrift-python runtime, and install the breeze CLI in an isolated virtual environment. openr/py/setup.py packages the staged source and generated bindings; it is not a standalone source-tree build entry point.

Docker Building / Usage

OpenR now has a Dockerfile. It uses gendeps.py to build all dependencies + OpenR.

docker build --network host .

Running

You can specify a config file by bind mount a directory with a openr.cfg file in /config

docker run --name openr --network host openr_ubuntu

• To use a custom config bind mount /config into the container
  • OpenR binary will look for /config/openr.conf

License

OpenR is MIT licensed.