Install aerleon with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• aclcheck
• aclgen

Project history

Aerleon began as a fork of Google's Capirca. The official README is explicit about the fork lineage and lists the project's major additions: YAML policy and network definition files, a pol2yaml converter, FQDN data in network definitions, plugin-based firewall platform support, typed Python APIs for ACL generation and aclcheck queries, a SLSA-compatible release process, regression tests, bug fixes, and performance enhancements.

The project carries forward Capirca's network-policy-as-code model while making it friendlier to modern Python packaging and YAML-oriented infrastructure workflows. The README credits Google-owned Capirca files and states that Aerleon documentation may contain modified phrases and sections from the original.

Adoption history

Aerleon's distribution path is centered on Python packaging and Homebrew. The official README documents installation with pip and Homebrew, and the supplied package-manager facts list Homebrew packaging for this batch.

The official README points users to GitHub Issues, GitHub Discussions, and a community Slack, which shows that the project has an operational user community around firewall policy generation rather than just a static fork.

How it is used

The typical workflow is to maintain policy and network definitions in a platform-neutral form, then run aclgen to emit vendor-specific firewall configs or aclcheck to query policy behavior. The official README highlights both the command-line workflow and typed Python APIs.

Because firewall policies are high-blast-radius configuration, Aerleon's package appeal is in repeatable generation and regression testing: the same policy source can target multiple vendors, and generated output can be reviewed, tested, and versioned.

Why package nerds care

Aerleon is interesting as a package because it is infrastructure-as-code for firewall rules in a relatively small CLI surface: aclgen and aclcheck. It also shows a common open-source lifecycle pattern where a widely used internal-origin tool, Capirca, is forked into a community package with modern release verification and packaging.

For Homebrew users, Aerleon provides a way to install network policy generation tooling outside Python virtualenv muscle memory while still matching the upstream Python package and docs.

Timeline

• 1.0.0: Earliest public release tag visible in the official GitHub repository.
• 2.0.x: Current major release series visible in official repository tags.
• Current docs: Read the Docs hosts the Aerleon documentation and links back to the GitHub repository.

Related projects

• Aerleon is directly related to Google Capirca, pol2yaml, Cisco ACL generation, Juniper policy generation, Palo Alto Networks config generation, and infrastructure-as-code workflows for network security policy.

Sources

• https://aerleon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• https://github.com/aerleon/aerleon
• https://github.com/aerleon/aerleon/blob/main/README.md