Re: Publishing BGP communties for your network (Re: What's up with BGP communities?)

[Jeroen Massar via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

> On 25 Jan 2026, at 18:31, Martin Pels via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
> [..]
>  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-grow-yang-bgp-communities/
>
> Using the model described here, networks can publish a JSON file with descriptions for the communities they use for 
> their Autonomous System.

I thought everybody just added a simple text file to:
 https://github.com/NLNOG/lg.ring.nlnog.net/tree/main/communities
and called it a day? That file format is simple, succint and readable by humans.

Is the intent of that YANG document to let a computer parse it and do automatic setting of action communities? Or is it 
just to see what the label is?


For my own looking glass what I do is I parse the above directory and translate it to a little lookup array. The two 
YANG ones from RIPE I parse in a similar way, similar to what the NLNOG LG does, all the YANG markup is just tossed 
though.


But in the end, for most purposes it is to turn the numbers into a label so that one can see what the community means. 
And unless it is an action policy, no computer will be acting upon those communities as one has to understand the full 
intent (and no, an LLM will not get that yet, and please do not let a LLM close to BGP :) )

Thus they should be good for humans setting an action community or viewing what the community means.

Any other purposes and thus reason why to make it more complex than that?


A WHOIS/RPSL way of being able to indicate where one stores their community.txt file for easy discovery would be cool 
though. Though that is likely something https://www.peeringdb.com <https://www.peeringdb.com/> could do and then it is 
solved too.

And for LGs the above repo has them all :) Only other source is https://bgp.tools <https://bgp.tools/> which has 
sometimes more details on some networks when folks have entered them manually there.

Regards,
 Jeroen

_______________________________________________
NANOG mailing list 
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog () lists nanog org/message/D727FQQXYPR3KVC4EAENVAXGVE5JC4O7/