Formerly known as rfcbib.

Relaton::Ietf is a Ruby gem that searches and fetches standards from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), including RFCs.

The standards scrape form https://www.rfc-editor.org/search/rfc_search.php

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'relaton-ietf'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install relaton-ietf

Usage

Fetching documents

require 'relaton/ietf'
=> true

# Fetch RFC document
item = Relaton::Ietf::Bibliography.get 'IETF RFC 8341'
relaton-ietf] INFO: (IETF RFC 8341) Fetching from Relaton repository ...
[relaton-ietf] INFO: (IETF RFC 8341) Found: `RFC 8341`
=> #<Relaton::Ietf::ItemData:0x0000000125608cb0
...

# Fetch Internet-Draft document
Relaton::Ietf::Bibliography.get 'IETF I-D.draft-abarth-cake-01'
[relaton-ietf] INFO: (IETF I-D.draft-abarth-cake-01) Fetching from Relaton repository ...
[relaton-ietf] INFO: (IETF I-D.draft-abarth-cake-01) Found: `draft-abarth-cake-01`
=> #<Relaton::Ietf::ItemData:0x000000012141fdd0
...

# Return nil if a document doesn't exist.
Relaton::Ietf::Bibliography.get 'IETF 1111'
[relaton-ietf] INFO: (IETF 1111) Fetching from Relaton repository ...
[relaton-ietf] INFO: (IETF 1111) Not found.
=> nil

Serialization

item.to_xml
=> "<bibitem id="RFC8341" type="standard" schema-version="v1.4.1">
      <fetched>2026-02-18</fetched>
      <title type="main">Network Configuration Access Control Model</title>
      <uri type="src">https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8341</uri>
      <docidentifier type="IETF" primary="true">RFC 8341</docidentifier>
      ....
    </bibitem>"

With bibdata: true option XML output is wrapped with bibdata element and ext element added.

item.to_xml bibdata: true
=> "<bibdata type="standard" schema-version="v1.4.1">
      <fetched>2026-02-18</fetched>
      <title type="main">Network Configuration Access Control Model</title>
      <uri type="src">https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8341</uri>
      <docidentifier type="IETF" primary="true">RFC 8341</docidentifier>
      ...
      <ext schema-version="v1.0.1">
        <doctype>rfc</doctype>
        <flavor>ietf</flavor>
        <stream>IETF</stream>
      </ext>
    </bibdata>"

Typed source links

IETF documents may have src, xml, and doi source link types.

• src - web publication

• xml - BibXML publication

• doi - DOI reference

item.source.first.type
=> "src"
item.source.first.content
=> "https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8341"

Parse a file locally

item = Relaton::Ietf::BibXMLParser.parse_rfc File.read("spec/fixtures/rfc.xml")
=> #<Relaton::Ietf::ItemData:0x000000012913e4d8
...

Create bibliographic item from YAML

Relaton::Ietf::Item.from_yaml File.read('spec/fixtures/item.yaml')
=> #<Relaton::Ietf::ItemData:0x0000000127edf508
...

Fetch data

There are IETF datasets that can be converted into RelatonXML/BibXML/BibYAML formats:

• ietf-rfcsubseries - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-index.xml (<bcp-entry>, <fyi-entry>, <std-entry>)

• ietf-internet-drafts - convert files from local directory ./bibxml-ids. Use rsync -avcizxL rsync.ietf.org::bibxml-ids ./bibxml-ids command to fetch the files.

• ietf-rfc-entries - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-index.xml (<rfc-entry>)

The method Relaton::Ietf::DataFetcher.fetch(source, output: "data", format: "yaml") converts all the documents from the dataset and saves them to the ./data folder in YAML format.

Arguments:

• source - dataset name (ietf-rfcsubseries or ietf-internet-drafts)

• output - folder to save documents (default './data').

• format - the format in which the documents are saved. Possible formats are: yaml, xml, bibxml (default yaml).

Relaton::Ietf::DataFetcher.fetch "ietf-internet-drafts"
Started at: 2021-12-17 10:23:20 +0100
Stopped at: 2021-12-17 10:29:19 +0100
Done in: 1360 sec.
=> nil

Logging

Relaton::Ietf uses the relaton-logger gem for logging. By default, it logs to STDOUT. To change the log levels and add other loggers, read the relaton-logger documentation.

Development

To update the index test fixtures (used by tests), run rake spec:update_index. This downloads the latest index files from the relaton-data-rfcs, relaton-data-rfcsubseries, and relaton-data-ids repositories.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/metanorma/relaton-ietf.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the [MIT License](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT).