RTNetlink is an extensible, high-level, pure Haskell interface for manipulating network interfaces on Linux: creating and destroying interfaces, changing and dumping interface settings, adding and removing addresses.

The core interface of RTNetlink is the RTNL monad. RTNL handles the heavy lifting of opening and closing netlink sockets, incrementing sequence numbers, and getting the responses for the current sequence number behind the scenes. Messages not that are not responses to a sent message, such as those sent to group subscribers, are stored in the backlog and can be retrieved with getBacklog.

The basic way to use RTNL is to use the create, destroy, dump, and change convenience functions. If you want more control, you can use talk and talk_. Import modules like System.Linux.RTNetlink.Link to get access to prefab instances of Create and Destroy messages, etc. Or import System.Linux.RTNetlink.Message to get access to the core typeclasses and create your own messages. System.Linux.RTNetlink.Packet has a number of functions to make this easier.

Example:

  
  module Main where

  import System.Linux.RTNetlink
  import System.Linux.RTNetlink.Link
  import Control.Monad (when)
  
  main :: IO ()
  main = runRTNL $ do
      let mybridge = LinkName "mybridge"
      create (Bridge mybridge)
      change mybridge Up
      state <- dump mybridge
      when (head state == Up) $
          liftIO (putStrLn "I did it, mom!")
      destroy mybridge