Quick links:

Download - get the source tarballs from the FTP or get the native packages (DEB/RPM/...) from Cloudsmith.
Documentation - Kea Administrator Reference Manual on readthedocs or Developer's guide on jenkins.
Mailing lists - kea-users (to discuss user related topics) or kea-dev (to discuss source code, hooks development and other software development related issues).
Issue tracker - Issues to check existing known bugs or report code bugs or request new features.
Current known issues - this is a list of significant or popular known problems.
Release notes - see the right hand panel or go release notes.
Designs - ISC process starts with a design for most non-trivial features. If you want to know more about Kea's internals, make sure you take a look at those. See the Design page or a list on the right hand panel (also click More Pages).
What are we working on right now? - see our current milestone

Welcome to the Kea project page. For the commercial Kea webpage, see http://isc.org/kea.

Kea is an open source DHCPv4/DHCPv6 server being developed by Internet Systems Consortium. Kea is a high-performance, extensible DHCP server engine that is designed to be easily modified and extended with hooks libraries.

Kea is named after the large, intelligent New Zealand parrot, currently a threatened species.

Kea is free open source, and we welcome community engagement, via the Kea-users mailing list and this Gitlab repository. There is a small core team of dedicated software engineers developing Kea. We need your contributions and support contracts to support them.

DHCP Standardization efforts: ISC participates and actively contributes to evolving Internet standards for the sake of stability and interoperability. The Director of DHCP Engineering at ISC is currently co-chair of the Dynamic Host Configuration working group in the IETF. We are committed to providing a standards-compliant implementation and are closely tracking developments in this working group and evaluating them for inclusion in Kea.

Kea Features

Separate DHCPv4, DHCPv6 and Dynamic DNS servers (run only the applications you are using)
Leases and host reservations can be stored in a local file (default) or optionally in a MySQL, Postgres or Cassandra database
IPv6 prefix delegation
Most popular options supported, including PXE boot
Shared networks
Applications API, with multiple application extensions available from ISC
On-line configuration. It is possible to update the configuration file and tell the servers to reload configuration without restarting the system.
Ample, documented statistics
REST api for remote management
High performance, with up to ~5000 leases per second (default), ~500 leases per second (with optional database backend)
Supported on Linux, BSD and Mac OS X operating systems

Recent Kea News

2019-08-28: Kea 1.6.0 released!

Kea 1.6.0 adds a new configuration backend, allowing you to store and manage most of your Kea configuration in a MySQL database. There is a new Subscriber hook providing an API for manipulating the configuration in the database. We also migrated our documentation to Sphinx, so it is now hosted on ReadTheDocs. The YANG model has been updated, and numerous smaller features requested by users, such as a 'Drop' class for blackholing spammy clients and max and min lease time settings.

To get the details, see the release notes at https://downloads.isc.org/isc/kea/1.6.0/Kea160ReleaseNotes.txt. Downloads are always available on the ISC.org downloads page or ISC ftp server. Please note that you will have to make some manual adjustments to file locations, etc, when updating to this release. See the notes on this wiki about upgrading.

ISC Now Has ISC-Kea Packages!

We have built Kea packages for current versions of CentOS, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu and so you can always have a package with the latest Kea software. These follow the existing OS package scripts in most cases, to make it easy to migrate to the ISC packages. Check our new repository at Cloudsmith.io. We would like to thank Cloudsmith for the free storage for our open source packages!

Installation Notes

You can either build from the source we provide, use one of the ISC Kea packages, or look for a suitable package for your operating system from an operating system repository.

Known Issues List

known issues for current and earlier releases

Collaboration

Contact us via the Kea mailing list if you think you might be interested in working on Kea and sharing that work with the community. We are a small team, so please be patient - it may take us a while to code-review unexpected contributions.

The primary things we need are:

Test coverage in different environments, with a variety of clients. We LOVE to hear when things are working well, too!
Applications based on the Kea API, both to validate the API and to demonstrate the potential for DHCP applications.
Detailed, specific requirements for new functionality

How to participate in this project

Subscribe to the Kea developers mailing list.
Read the User Guide (sections 16,17,18 and 19) and the Developer's Guide.
Download and build a Kea instance. Released, supported versions are available here and on the ISC web site. For the latest Kea code, please use our public Gitlab repository.
Give us feedback via the mailing list or submit a bug. See the known issues.
A description of the workflow can be found here Kea GitLab Workflow
(for students) Take part in Google Summer of Code for Kea
Read Contributor's guide if you want to contribute patches or new code.

Documentation

Installation and system specific notes for building Kea.
User Guide - we do have two versions. (Stable) documents the latest stable release. (Development snapshot) documents the latest git version and is rebuilt daily.
Documentation - a directory with documentation (User's Guide, list of all messages Kea can print and more). Rebuilt daily.
Developer's Guide - addressed at developers and contributors. This is regenerated daily.
Design documents - shown in the panel at the right, these are detailed descriptions of existing and planned features.
Commands - Planned and currently supported Kea commands (available through REST API or control channel).
ISC Knowledgebase - (miscellaneous useful articles, including any security vulnerabilities)
Kea coding guidelines - Please read those before you start writing code.
Sphinx documentation - We're in the process of migrating to Sphinx. This page will keep you up to date.

Testing

ISC is using Jenkins and ISC Forge system/conformance/regression tests to validate Kea.

Getting in touch

Kea Users mailing list - feel free to post any Kea questions here

Kea Developers mailing list - for development discussions

Kea Announce mailing list - for announcements from ISC

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