rfc

A command-line tool to search, retrieve, and display IETF RFCs and Internet-Drafts.

Features

• View RFCs and Internet-Drafts - fetch and display documents in your preferred viewer
• Search - query the IETF Datatracker by keyword
• Local caching - documents are cached for offline access and faster repeat reads
• Format conversion - falls back to HTML and converts to plain text when no .txt is published

Installation

Requires Rust. If you don't have it, see rustup.rs.

From crates.io:

cargo install ietf-rfc

The installed binary is named rfc.

From source:

git clone https://github.com/treyaspelund/rfc.git
cd rfc
cargo install --path .

Usage

The default command, rfc <document>, looks in the local cache first and only hits the network on a miss. Everything else lives under a subcommand.

View a document

rfc 9000                    # RFC 9000 (QUIC)
rfc rfc9000                 # works with prefix
rfc "RFC 9000"              # case-insensitive, space tolerated (quote to keep as one arg)
rfc draft-ietf-quic-transport       # latest draft version auto-resolved
rfc draft-ietf-quic-transport-34    # pinned version

Pick a viewer

By default the document opens in $EDITOR, then $PAGER, then nothing. Override with -o:

rfc -o less 9000
rfc -o "code -" 9000        # quoted forms with arguments are split for you

The document is written to a tempfile and the viewer is invoked with the path as its final argument - works for editors and pagers alike.

Open in web browser instead of viewing locally:

rfc -w 9000                 # Open RFC 9000 on IETF Datatracker
rfc --web draft-ietf-quic-transport  # Open draft in browser

Refresh from the API

There's no --refresh flag. To force a re-fetch, run rfc fetch then rfc <doc>:

rfc fetch 9000              # always hits the API, caches, doesn't open
rfc 9000                    # now reads from the freshened cache

Search

rfc search quic
rfc search bgp message              # multi-token, word-order independent
rfc search quic -d                  # drafts only
rfc search quic -a                  # both RFCs and drafts (default: RFCs only)
rfc search bgp -l 50                # raise the result cap (default 25)

Cache management

rfc cache list              # cached documents with titles
rfc cache list -w           # don't truncate titles
rfc cache info              # location + total size
rfc cache remove 9000       # drop a single document
rfc cache clear             # nuke everything

Cache location

• Linux: ~/.cache/rfc/
• macOS: ~/Library/Caches/rfc/
• Windows: {FOLDERID_LocalAppData}\rfc\cache\

Each document is stored with its content (.txt) and a metadata sidecar (.meta) holding the title.

License

BSD-3-Clause