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 a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...

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 used for querying databases that store an Internet resource's registered users or assignees. These resources include domain names, IP address blocks and autonomo ...

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 co ...

, RADB and APNIC. 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 communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

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