Introduction

route53d is a DNS frontend to the Amazon Route 53 API. It allows you to use standard DNS tools to make changes to your Route 53 zones. At the moment it supports adding and deleting resource records by dynamic update (e.g with nsupdate).

Support for slaving from your master DNS server by incremental zone transfer (IXFR) and pushing zones changes to the API is committed but not yet well tested. Grab the source to try it.

Requirements

• Python
• boto 2.0+
• dnspython
• An active Amazon Route 53 account and AWS Access Keys with access to your Route 53 service

Installation

1. Install Python, dnspython and Boto according to their documentation. This may help.
2. route53d uses Boto to call the Route 53 API. Configure Boto with your AWS access key. There's a tutorial on the AWS blog about setting up service-specific keys if you'd prefer not to give route53d a full-access key.
3. Create a config file. Use route53d.ini.sample as the starting point
4. Start the daemon: route53d.py [--config /path/to/route53d.ini]

Caveats

At the moment there is no authentication. Be sure that route53d isn't reachable from untrusted sources.

The DNS dynamic update mechanism allows deletion of 1) a specific resource-record, 2) a resource-record set, or 3) deletion of all records belonging to a name. The Route 53 API implements only specific resource-record deletion so route53d will reject requests for the other deletion types.

There has been only one release of route53d because it relies on features in the development train of boto. Until boto makes a release with their Route 53 support their APIs are still subject to change and potential breakage.