zeek/auxil/spicy/doc/index.rst
Patrick Kelley 8fd444092b initial
2025-05-07 15:35:15 -04:00

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================================================================
Spicy --- Generating Robust Parsers for Protocols & File Formats
================================================================
.. literalinclude:: examples/frontpage.spicy
:language: spicy
::
# echo "GET /index.html HTTP/1.0" | spicy-driver http-request.spicy
[$method=b"GET", $uri=b"/index.html", $version=[$number=b"1.0"]]
Overview
Spicy is a parser generator that makes it easy to create robust
C++ parsers for network protocols, file formats, and more. Spicy
is a bit like a "yacc for protocols", but it's much more than
that: It's an all-in-one system enabling developers to write
attributed grammars that describe both syntax and semantics of an
input format using a single, unified language. Think of Spicy as a
domain-specific scripting language for all your parsing needs.
The Spicy toolchain turns such grammars into efficient C++ parsing
code that exposes an API to host applications for instantiating
parsers, feeding them input, and retrieving their results. At
runtime, parsing proceeds fully incrementally—and potentially
highly concurrently—on input streams of arbitrary size.
Compilation of Spicy parsers takes place either just-in-time at
startup (through a C++ compiler); or ahead-of-time either by
creating pre-compiled shared libraries, or by giving you generated
C++ code that you can link into your application.
Spicy comes with Zeek support that enables adding new protocol and
file analyzers to `Zeek <https://www.zeek.org>`_ without having to
write any C++ code. You define the grammar, specify which Zeek
events to generate, and Spicy takes care of the rest.
See our :ref:`collection of example grammars <examples>` to get a
sense of what Spicy looks like.
License
Spicy is open source and released under a BSD license, which
allows for pretty much unrestricted use as long as you leave the
license header in place. You fully own any parsers that Spicy
generates from your grammars.
History
Spicy was originally developed as a research prototype at the
`International Computer Science Institute
<http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/>`_ with funding from the `U.S.
National Science Foundation <https://www.nsf.gov>`_. Since then,
Spicy has been rebuilt from the ground up by `Corelight
<https://www.corelight.com>`_, which has contributed the new
implementation to the Zeek Project.
.. _feedback:
Getting in Touch
----------------
Having trouble using Spicy? Have ideas how to make Spicy better? We'd
like to hear from you!
- Report issues on the GitHub `ticket tracker <https://github.com/zeek/spicy/issues>`_.
- Ask the ``#spicy`` channel on `Zeek's Slack <https://zeek.org/connect>`_.
- Check out the `Zeek community Discourse
<https://community.zeek.org>`_ and discuss Spicy under the
`Spicy tag <https://community.zeek.org/c/spicy>`_.
- To follow development, subscribe to the `commits mailing list
<https://groups.google.com/a/zeek.org/g/spicy-commits/>`_ (it can be
noisy!).
Documentation
-------------
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 2
:numbered:
installation
getting-started
faq
tutorial/index
programming/index
toolchain
zeek
host-applications
release-notes
development/index
Index
-----
* :ref:`genindex`
* :ref:`modindex`
* :ref:`search`