Mailing Lists

There are two mailing lists for following Bro development:

bro-dev

Discussion of all topics relevant to Bro development, including strategy, roadmap, patches, code questions, etc. Note that general questions about using Bro are better sent to the Bro User List .

bro-commits

Auto-generated notifications of commits to Bro’s git repositories. These mails include full diffs of the corresponding edits and are a good way of keeping track of changes. However, volume on this list is quite high.

Status

Bro Release Roadmap

Lists our near- and medium-term goals for upcoming releases.

Current Projects

Lists a number of specific projects currently being worked on, or planned for the future.

Open Projects

Lists functionality we’d like to see, but which nobody is currently working on. Let us know if you feel like helping.

Resources

Git Repositories

Lists the Bro-related git repositories.

Contributing

Provides guidelines for submitting patches and new functionality.

Development Process

Summarizes our git-based development process, including information on how to submit patches for inclusion into Bro.

Issue Tracker

Tracks open problems as well as external contributions submitted for inclusion. There are also some guidelines on using the tracker.

Documentation In Development

The documentation on this page follows the current development versions.

How-Tos

While we do not have a comprehensive development guide at the moment, there are some How-Tos documenting specific parts of Bro source code. Note that some specifics in there might have changed since the text was written, the authorative source is always the source code obviously.

CMake Project Organization

Description of Bro’s CMake-based build infrastructure.

Usage of bifcl

Description of using Bro’s bifcl tool for defining built-in functions, variables, and types.

BTest

Documentation for the shell-based unit testing framework we use, called BTest.

Starting Points

Collection of a few starting points for looking at Bro’s source code.

Adding Analyzers

Overview of hooking a new protocol analyzer into Bro’s processing.

BinPAC Sample Analyzer

A BinPAC-based skeleton analyzer that can be used as a starting point for parsing new protocols.

Finding Memory Leaks

Strategies for finding memory leaks.

Coding with IPv6 in Mind

For now, Bro’s IPv6 needs to be explicitly enabled at compile-time. This How-To summarizes how to write code that works in both modes.

Serialization

Bro can serialize instances of many of its classes into binary form. This How-To documents how to add such support to a class.

Connection Timers

A summary of the internal timers associated with a connection object.

Bro Scripting Conventions

Best-practices and standard conventions used when writing in the Bro scripting language.

Writing Documentation

Using reStructuredText

Almost all documentation, including these web pages, are written in the reStructuredText markup language.

Writing Documention for Bro

doc/README from the Bro repository summarizes some guidelines for writing documentation included into the distribution.

Documenting Policy Scripts

Overview of the markup used for documenting Bro policy scripts so that they can be included into the automatically generated script reference.