lae.netbox

Deploys and configures DigitalOcean's NetBox.

This role will deploy NetBox within its own virtualenv either by release tarball or via git using Python 3 (or 2 if you're so inclined) and uWSGI as the application server.

Tested and supported against CentOS 7/Debian 8 and 9/Ubuntu 16.

Note that this role is slightly opinionated and differs from installation instructions from the NetBox documentation. The main differences are:

• Uses distro-provided systemd instead of supervisord
• Uses uWSGI as an application server instead of gunicorn
• Hardens the NetBox/uWSGI service (see templates/netbox.service.j2)
• Will hot reload on upgrades and configuration changes

Quickstart

Provided you have Ansible installed and are using defaults:

ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.postgresql lae.netbox
ansible-playbook -i your.server.fqdn, ~/.ansible/roles/lae.netbox/examples/playbook_single_host_deploy.yml -K

This will deploy NetBox and PostgreSQL on your.server.fqdn; once complete it should be accessible on port 80. Modify if needed. Read below for more insight.

Prerequisites

Database

This role does not setup a PostgreSQL server (but will create a database if needed), so you'll need to setup a PostgreSQL server and create a database user separate from this role. Take a look at the Example Playbook section.

Please note that as of v2.2, NetBox requires PostgreSQL 9.4 or higher.

Role Variables

See examples/ for some playbooks you could write for different scenarios. Note that some variables below must be defined in your playbook.

netbox_stable: false
netbox_git: false

It's required to set one of the above variables to true. netbox_stable tells the role to deploy by extracting tarball releases from GitHub, while netbox_git tells the role to clone a NetBox git repository - they're mutually exclusive.

netbox_stable_version: 2.3.4
netbox_stable_uri: "https://github.com/digitalocean/netbox/archive/v{{ netbox_stable_version }}.tar.gz"

These can be configured to pin a version (e.g. increment to trigger an upgrade) or deploy using a tarball located somewhere else. Useful for when you need to modify something in a release or are deploying while firewalled in your local network.

netbox_git_version: develop
netbox_git_uri: "https://github.com/digitalocean/netbox.git"

netbox_git_version can be any valid ref within a git repository. netbox_git_uri can be used to point to e.g. an on-premise repo or a fork.

netbox_superuser_username: admin
#netbox_superuser_password: changeme
netbox_superuser_email: admin@localhost

It is required to set the superuser password. This role will create a new superuser if the user does not exist, or will modify an existing user if they're not a superuser/have a different email or password. (Yes, you can use this to reset your superuser password if you forget it.)

netbox_database: netbox
netbox_database_user: netbox
#netbox_database_password: changeme
#netbox_database_host: localhost
netbox_database_port: 5432
#netbox_database_socket: /var/run/postgresql

It is required to configure either a socket directory (to communicate over UNIX sockets) or a host/password (to use TCP/IP). See the Example Playbook section for more information on configuring the database.

Note that these are used to configure DATABASE in configuration.py.

netbox_config:
  #SECRET_KEY:
  ALLOWED_HOSTS:
    - localhost
    - 127.0.0.1
  MEDIA_ROOT: "{{ netbox_shared_path }}/media"
  REPORTS_ROOT: "{{ netbox_shared_path }}/reports"

This is a dictionary of settings used to template NetBox's configuration.py. See Mandatory Settings and Optional Settings from the NetBox documentation for more details, as well as examples/netbox_config.yml in this repository.

It is not necessary to define SECRET_KEY here - this role will automatically create one for you and store it in {{ netbox_shared_path }}/generated_secret_key. The SECRET_KEY will then be read from this file on subsequent runs, unless you later do set this in your playbook. Note that you should define the SECRET_KEY if you are deploying multiple NetBox instances behind one load balancer.

MEDIA_ROOT/REPORTS_ROOT, while not mandatory in the NetBox documentation, is mandatory in this role in order to prevent missing files. It should be set to a directory that is permanent and not lost on upgrade (the default, listed above, can be used without issue).

netbox_user: netbox
netbox_group: netbox
netbox_home: /srv/netbox
netbox_releases_path: "{{ netbox_home }}/releases"
netbox_git_repo_path: "{{ netbox_releases_path }}/git-repo"
netbox_git_deploy_path: "{{ netbox_releases_path }}/git-deploy"
netbox_stable_path: "{{ netbox_releases_path }}/netbox-{{ netbox_stable_version }}"
netbox_current_path: "{{ netbox_home }}/current"
netbox_shared_path: "{{ netbox_home }}/shared"

These are all deployment details that you can modify to change the application user and application storage locations. netbox_releases_path stores all NetBox releases you've ever deployed. netbox_git_repo_path is where the Git repository will be cloned to and should remain untouched - whilst netbox_git_deploy_path is where a git archive using the ref netbox_git_version will be extracted to. netbox_stable_path is the extracted folder from a release tarball. netbox_current_path will be symlinked to the selected release and used in service/configuration files as the location NetBox is installed. netbox_shared_path is intended to store configuration files and other "shared" content, like logs.

netbox_python: 3

If you wish to deploy using Python 2, set this to 2.

netbox_socket: "127.0.0.1:8000"
netbox_protocol: http
netbox_processes: "{{ ansible_processor_vcpus }}"

netbox_socket defines what the uWSGI service will bind to and can be set to any valid ListenStream address (systemd socket). Set netbox_protocol to uwsgi if you want uWSGI to speak WSGI (for instance if you're running nginx as a load balancer). netbox_processes defines how many NetBox workers uWSGI will bring up to serve requests.

netbox_application_log: "file:{{ netbox_shared_path }}/application.log"
netbox_requests_log: "file:{{ netbox_shared_path }}/requests.log"

These define where logs will be stored. You can use external logging facilities instead of local files if you wish, as long as uWSGI supports it. Application log correlates to logger and requests log to req-logger.

netbox_load_initial_data: false

To load the initial data shipped by NetBox, set this to true.

netbox_ldap_enabled: false
netbox_ldap_config_template: netbox_ldap_config.py.j2

Toggle netbox_ldap_enabled to true to configure LDAP authentication for NetBox. netbox_ldap_config_template should be the path to your template - by default, Ansible will search your playbook's templates/ directory for this. You can find an example in examples/.

netbox_napalm_enabled: false

Toggle this to enable NAPALM integration in NetBox. You must define NAPALM_USERNAME and NAPALM_PASSWORD in the netbox_config variable to be able to use NAPALM.

Example Playbook

The following installs PostgreSQL and creates a user with @geerlingguy's robust Postgres role, then proceeds to deploy and configure NetBox using a local unix socket to talk to the Postgres server with the default netbox database user.

- hosts: netbox.idolactiviti.es
  become: yes
  roles:
    - geerlingguy.postgresql
    - lae.netbox
  vars:
    netbox_stable: true
    netbox_database_socket: "{{ postgresql_unix_socket_directories[0] }}"
    netbox_superuser_password: netbox
    netbox_socket: "0.0.0.0:80"
    netbox_config:
      ALLOWED_HOSTS:
        - netbox.idolactiviti.es
      MEDIA_ROOT: "{{ netbox_shared_path }}/media"
      REPORTS_ROOT: "{{ netbox_shared_path }}/reports"
    postgresql_users:
      - name: "{{ netbox_database_user }}"
        role_attr_flags: CREATEDB,NOSUPERUSER

Note the CREATEDB attribute.

Assuming you have a PG server already running with the user netbox_prod_user created, it owns a database called netbox_prod, and it allows the host you're installing NetBox on to authenticate with it over TCP:

- hosts: netbox.idolactiviti.es
  become: yes
  roles:
    - lae.netbox
  vars:
    netbox_stable: true
    netbox_superuser_password: netbox
    netbox_socket: "0.0.0.0:80"
    netbox_config:
      ALLOWED_HOSTS:
        - "{{ inventory_hostname }}"
      MEDIA_ROOT: "{{ netbox_shared_path }}/media"
      REPORTS_ROOT: "{{ netbox_shared_path }}/reports"
    netbox_database_host: pg-netbox.idolactiviti.es
    netbox_database_port: 15432
    netbox_database: netbox_prod
    netbox_database_user: netbox_prod_user
    netbox_database_password: "very_secure_password_for_prod"

See examples/ for more.