Hi, I'm from Tigera and responsible for that calico/bird image, so just adding a few more details in case they are of interest.

Probably the most important thing is that it's using BIRD 1.6.8 (plus some deltas as Hugo pointed out); I guess Billy that you will probably prefer something based on the latest BIRD code.

It doesn't contain any peering config, but its config file includes

    include "/etc/bird/*.conf";

So when we use this for our own network modelling, we start the container with docker run, then inject the peering config with code like

        cat <<EOF | docker exec -i bird-a1 sh -c "cat > /etc/bird/peer-rb1.conf"
    protocol bgp rb1 {
      description "Connection to BGP peer";
      local as 65001;

      ...
    }
    EOF
        docker exec bird-a1 birdcl configure

The code for the fork and image building can be found at https://github.com/projectcalico/bird.

Best wishes,

    Nell

On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 4:09 AM Hugo Slabbert via Bird-users <bird-users@network.cz> wrote:

If you're looking for vanilla BIRD, I'd package something myself, rather, or https://hub.docker.com/r/pierky/bird/ if you want something pre-packaged. The repo for that calico/bird image explicitly calls out:

> This is a fork of the BIRD internet routing daemon which provides the following additional function used by Calico:
> * Support for routing using IP-in-IP

Its Dockerfile calls a /opt/bird-wrapper.sh entrypoint (https://github.com/projectcalico/bird/blob/feature-ipinip/dist/amd64/birdy/bird-wrapper.sh), which runs split IPv4/IPv6 daemons in bird 1.x style.

My previous gig ran BIRD in a custom container in a large distributed environment for heavy production services.

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 2:59 PM Matt Griswold <grizz@20c.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 10:23:04PM +0000, Billy R Ridgway wrote:
> I am interested in running Bird from within a docker container to act as a BGP router. I see that https://hub.docker.com/r/calico/bird exists but when I deploy it it doesn’t seem to have anything inside of it. Maybe I am not using this calico bird container properly? If this is the wrong direction, I can just yum install a bird rpm into a ubi container and move forward that way. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

I have no idea on the calico container, but we run it in production with
podman using an image that builds from source on ubi8. We didn't use the
yum version because we have specific needs. but I'm sure it would work
fine as well.

Cheers