Kea Developer's Guide

Welcome to the Kea Developer's Guide. This documentation is addressed at either existing or prospective Kea developers and contributors, and provides information needed to extend and maintain Kea source code.

If you wish to write hook code - the code that is loaded by Kea at run-time and modifies its behavior, you should read the section Hooks Developer's Guide.

Kea maintenance information is divided into a number of sections. Information on DHCP-specific topics can be found in the DHCP Maintenance Guide. General topics are discussed in Miscellaneous Topics.

If you are a user or system administrator, rather than software engineer, you should read the Kea Administrator Reference Manual instead. If you are using a beta or development version of Kea, the development version of the manual is recommended.

Regardless of your field of expertise, you are encouraged to visit the Kea wikipage (https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/wikis/home)

Contributor's Guide

• Kea Contributor's Guide - This page describes the process of sending a patch to ISC and what happens next. Please read it if you are considering sending us any code.

Quality Assurance

• Quality Assurance in Kea
• Building Kea with Unit Tests
  • Environment Variables
  • Use Sanitizers
  • Databases Configuration for Unit Tests
  • Running unit tests with Sysrepo
  • Writing shell scripts and tests
• Performance Testing
• Fuzzing Kea
• Quality Assurance
  • Running CI pipeline on Github
  • Running CI pipeline on Gitlab
  • Running CI pipeline on Jenkins

Hooks Framework

• Hooks Developer's Guide
• The Hooks API for the DHCPv4 Server
• The Hooks API for the DHCPv6 Server
• The Hooks API for the Control Agent
• The Hooks API for the Kea DHCP DDNS (D2)
• Guide to Hooks for the Kea Component Developer
• Hooks Maintenance Guide
• Kea High Availability Hooks Library
• DHCP User Check Hooks Library
• Kea Lease Commands Hooks Library
• Kea Stat Commands Hooks Library

DHCP Maintenance Guide

• DHCPv4 Server Component
  • Configuration Parser in DHCPv4
  • DHCPv4 configuration inheritance
  • Custom functions to parse message options
  • DHCPv4 Server Support for the Dynamic DNS Updates
  • DHCPv4 Client Classification
  • Configuration backend for DHCPv4
  • Reconfiguring DHCPv4 server with SIGHUP signal
  • Other DHCPv4 topics
  • DHCPv4-over-DHCPv6 DHCPv4 Server Side
• DHCPv6 Server Component
  • Configuration Parsers in DHCPv6
  • DHCPv6 Configuration Inheritance
  • DHCPv6 Server Support for the Dynamic DNS Updates
  • Custom functions to parse message options
  • DHCPv6 Client Classification
  • Configuration backend for DHCPv6
  • Reconfiguring DHCPv6 server with SIGHUP signal
  • Other DHCPv6 topics
  • DHCPv4-over-DHCPv6 DHCPv6 Server Side
• Congestion Handling in Kea DHCP Servers
• DHCP-DDNS Component
  • D2's CPL Derivations
  • Configuration Management
  • Request Reception and Queuing
  • Update Execution
  • Main Event Loop
  • Transactions
  • State Model Implementation
  • Transaction Execution Example
• Control Agent Component
  • Receiving commands over HTTP
  • Creating HTTP responses
  • Handling commands with Command Manager
  • Security considerations
• Lease File Cleanup Component
  • Processing
  • File Manipulation
• Control Channel
  • Control Channel Overview
  • Using UNIX Control Channel
  • Control Channel Implementation
  • Accepting connections
• DHCP Database Back-Ends
• Kea Configuration Backends
  • The JSON Configuration Backend

Kea libraries

• libkea-util - Kea Utilities Library
• libkea-asiolink - Kea Boost ASIO Library
• libkea-cc - Kea Configuration Utilities Library
• libkea-database - Kea Database Library
• libkea-dhcp++ - Low Level DHCP Library
  • Libdhcp++ Library Introduction
  • Relay v6 support in Pkt6
  • Interface Manager
  • Switchable Packet Filter objects used by Interface Manager
  • Switchable Packet Filters for DHCPv6
  • Logging non-fatal errors in IfaceMgr
• libkea-stats - Kea Statistics Library
• libkea-asiodns - Kea I/O Library
• libkea-dhcp_ddns - DHCP_DDNS Request I/O Library
• libkea-dhcpsrv - Server DHCP Library
  • Lease Manager
  • Configuration Manager
  • Host Manager
  • Options Configuration Information
  • Allocation Engine
  • Timer Manager
  • Leases Reclamation Routine
  • Subnet Selection
  • DHCPv4-over-DHCPv6 Inter Process Communication
• libkea-eval - Expression Evaluation and Client Classification Library
• libkea-process - Controllable Process Layer (CPL)
  • Controllable Process Layer (CPL)
  • CPL Signal Handling
• libkea-yang - Kea YANG Utilities Library
• libkea-http - Kea HTTP Library

Miscellaneous Topics

• Terminology
• ChangeLog
• Flex/Bison Parsers
• Kea Logging
  • Basic Ideas
  • Using Logging in a Kea Component
  • Notes on the Use of Logging
• Logging API
• Kea Cross-Compiling Example
• Debugging Kea
• Building Kea Documentation
• Documentation Warnings and Errors