HTTP API for nftables
an idea by crameleon
Updated 11 days ago. No love. 1 follower. Has no hacker: grab it!

Background

The idea originated in https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/164060 and is about building RESTful API which translates authorized HTTP requests to operations in nftables, possibly utilizing libnftables-json(5).

Originally, I started developing such an interface in Go, utilizing https://github.com/google/nftables. The conversion of string networks to nftables set elements was problematic (unfortunately no record of details), and I started a second attempt in Python, which made interaction much simpler thanks to native nftables Python bindings.

Goals

  1. Find and track the issue with google/nftables
  2. Revisit and polish the Go or Python code (prefer Go, but possibly depends on implementing missing functionality), primarily the server component
  3. Finish functionality to interact with nftables sets (retrieving and updating elements), which are of interest for the originating issue
  4. Align test suite
  5. Packaging

Resources

  • https://git.netfilter.org/nftables/tree/py/src/nftables.py
  • https://git.com.de/Georg/nftables-http-api (to be moved to GitHub)
  • https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:crameleon:containers/pytest-nftables-container

Results

  • Started new https://github.com/tacerus/nftables-http-api.
  • First Go nftables issue was related to set elements needing to be added with different start and end addresses - coincidentally, this was recently discovered by someone else, who added a useful helper function for this: https://github.com/google/nftables/pull/342.
  • Further improvements submitted: https://github.com/google/nftables/pull/347.

Side results

Upon starting to unify the structure and implementing more functionality, missing JSON output support was noticed for some subcommands in libnftables. Submitted patches here as well:

  • https://lore.kernel.org/netfilter-devel/20251203131736.4036382-2-georg@syscid.com/T/#u

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Looking for hackers with the skills:

nftables api netfilter restful rest go

This project is part of:

Hack Week 25

Activity

  • 11 days ago: crameleon removed keyword falcon from this project.
  • 11 days ago: crameleon removed keyword python from this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon added keyword "go" to this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon added keyword "python" to this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon added keyword "nftables" to this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon added keyword "api" to this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon added keyword "netfilter" to this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon added keyword "falcon" to this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon added keyword "restful" to this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon added keyword "rest" to this project.
  • 21 days ago: crameleon originated this project.


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