Described herein are methods and systems for automatically generating routing configuration files based on a network topology and a collection of routing configuration templates. Such automatically generated routing configuration files may be suitable for a network running one or more of the RIP, EIGRP, OSPF, IS-IS and BGP routing protocols. The network topology may be specified in a graph description language, such as DOT, and/or a graph modeling language, such as GraphML. The routing configuration templates include certain routing protocol commands or sequence of commands that are frequently repeated in the configuration of a network device. Based on the network topology, the routing configuration templates are instantiated in a certain fashion, and any placeholders therein are replaced with information specific to the network topology.