The Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL) is a language commonly used by

Internet Service Provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privat ...

s to describe their routing policies. The routing policies are stored at various

whois WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase "who is") is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block or an autonomou ...

databases including

RIPE Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE, French for "European IP Networks") is a forum open to all parties with an interest in the technical development of the Internet. The RIPE community's objective is to ensure that the administrative and technical coor ...

RADB The Routing Assets Database (RADb), formerly known as the Routing Arbiter Database is a public database in which the Internet service provider, operators of Internet networks publish authoritative declarations of routing policy for their Autonomous ...

and

APNIC APNIC (the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) is the regional Internet address registry ( RIR) for the Asia-Pacific region. It is one of the world's five RIRs and is part of the Number Resource Organization ( NRO). APNIC provides numb ...

. ISPs (using automated tools) then generate router configuration files that match their business and technical policies.
RFC2622
describes RPSL, and replaced RIPE-181.

provides a reference tutorial to using RPSL in practice to support

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv ...

routing policies.

RPSL Tools and Programs

RtConfig
- automatically generate router configuration files from RPSL registry entries (This software is part of the IRRToolSet)
irrPT
- Tools for ISPs to collect and use information from Internet Routing Registry (IRR) databases

External links

RIPE RPSL page
Internet architecture Routing