IRR Commands¶

The irr command group fetches APNIC Internet Routing Registry (IRR) database dumps. APNIC publishes gzipped RPSL (Routing Policy Specification Language) objects under ftp.apnic.net/apnic/whois/apnic.db.<type>.gz, one file per object class. The CLI fetches, gunzips, and parses these into structured objects; a separate serial subcommand returns the current IRR database serial number (APNIC.CURRENTSERIAL).

Source: cmd_irr.go.

Command Classification¶

The 19 valid object types group into four families. serial is a metadata command that does not parse a dump — it returns the single integer tracking the current IRR database revision.

graph TB
    IRR["irr"]

    IRR --> SERIAL["serial<br/>APNIC.CURRENTSERIAL"]
    IRR --> TYPES["irr &lt;type&gt;<br/>fetch + parse RPSL dump"]

    subgraph NET["Network objects"]
        INET["inetnum"]
        INET6["inet6num"]
        ROUTE["route"]
        ROUTE6["route6"]
        AUTNUM["aut-num"]
    end

    subgraph ROUTING["Routing sets"]
        ASSET["as-set"]
        ASBLOCK["as-block"]
        RTSET["route-set"]
        PSET["peering-set"]
        RTRSET["rtr-set"]
        INETRTR["inet-rtr"]
    end

    subgraph ORG["Organisational objects"]
        MNT["mntner"]
        ORG["organisation"]
        ROLE["role"]
        IRT["irt"]
    end

    subgraph META["Metadata / other"]
        DOM["domain<br/>(reverse-DNS delegations)"]
        KC["key-cert"]
        FS["filter-set"]
        LIM["limerick"]
    end

    TYPES --> NET
    TYPES --> ROUTING
    TYPES --> ORG
    TYPES --> META

apnic irr <type>¶

Fetch and parse one RPSL object-class dump. The object type is the only positional argument and must be one of the 19 valid types.

Valid types¶

Flags¶

This subcommand takes no flags beyond the global flags. The fetched dump is cached within the configured --cache-ttl, so repeated invocations inside the TTL are cheap.

Examples¶

# Parsed inetnum objects
apnic irr inetnum

# IPv6 route objects, as JSON
apnic --json irr route6 | jq '.objects[0:5]'

# All reverse-DNS delegation objects (x.in-addr.arpa with nserver/zone-c)
apnic irr domain

# Throttle a large route dump fetch
apnic --rate-limit 1 --max-concurrent-downloads 4 --chunk-size 2MB irr route

Output format (human-readable)¶

# irr route: 184532 objects
route   203.0.113.0/24
route   203.0.113.128/25
...
... (50 more)

Columns are tab-separated: Type PrimaryKey. The human-readable view is capped at 50 rows for terminal sanity; the ... (N more) footer reports the remainder. With --json, the full IRRDatabase (Type, Objects[] of {Type, PrimaryKey, ...}) is emitted.

apnic irr serial¶

Fetch the APNIC.CURRENTSERIAL value — the current IRR database serial number. This is the lightweight way to check whether the IRR database has advanced since your last fetch; bump the serial and re-pull the dumps that interest you.

apnic irr serial
# 4287153

apnic --json irr serial
# { "serial": 4287153 }

Human-readable output is a single integer. With --json, an object {"serial": <int64>} is emitted.

Fetch and Parse Flow¶

sequenceDiagram
    participant U as User
    participant CLI as apnic irr
    participant SDK as apnic.Client
    participant FTP as ftp.apnic.net

    U->>CLI: apnic irr inetnum
    CLI->>SDK: GetIRRDatabase(ctx, "inetnum")
    SDK->>SDK: cache lookup (TTL)
    alt cache miss
        SDK->>FTP: GET /apnic/whois/apnic.db.inetnum.gz
        FTP-->>SDK: gzipped RPSL text
        SDK->>SDK: gunzip + parse RPSL objects
        SDK->>SDK: store in cache
    end
    SDK-->>CLI: *IRRDatabase
    CLI-->>U: 50-row preview / --json full

GetIRRDatabase caches the parsed database by object type for the duration of --cache-ttl. The gzipped dumps can be large (the route dump exceeds 100 MB), so the SDK fetches them with parallel HTTP Range requests — tune that with --max-concurrent-downloads and --chunk-size.

Global flags of note¶

Output summary¶