NetBox Helm Charts 5.0 Is Now Available

Originally created by Chris Boot in 2019, the NetBox Helm chart has evolved significantly since its inception and is now used by hundreds of organizations across the world to run NetBox on Kubernetes.

In 2024 we released NetBox Enterprise which leans on the NetBox Helm Chart and has led to significant collaboration between the initial maintainers and NetBox Labs, resulting in us reaching a major new milestone: version 5.0!

Chris Boot has contributed the charts to be maintained as part of the NetBox Community GitHub repository. With his help along with significant contributions from Léo Colombaro and many other folks who submitted PRs (that Dependabot dude is unstoppable!), the charts have been moved, cleaned up, and enhanced in a number of ways to set a good baseline for the future.

What’s New?

Much of the work done since the previous stable release happened under the covers, cleaning up oddities, standardizing templating, and simplifying customization.

The default NetBox install now uses the latest 4.x version, and the PostgreSQL and Redis subcharts have also been updated to modern versions.

Significantly, a lot of groundwork has been laid to simplify keeping the chart up-to-date and making it easier to implement new features going forward. Branch management, testing, and automatic version updates have been implemented, and the chart now officially follows Semantic Versioning to make it simpler to identify when new features or breaking changes are introduced.

How Do I Upgrade?

For the most part, existing configurations should move over without a ton of work. However, you will want to make note of the “breaking changes” section of the release notes for any potential modifications you might need to make.

The most significant work necessary to upgrade is if you are using the built-in PostgreSQL, since newer NetBox versions require PostgreSQL 12 (or higher) and the 4.x-chart-provided PostgreSQL 11. Thanks to testing done by contributor David U, we have a detailed migration guide for upgrading, including how to transfer your data to the latest PostgreSQL.

What’s Next?

Going forward, the majority of changes will be related to keeping up with dependencies, including NetBox versions. On top of that there’s still a lot we can do to simplify extending the configuration for customization, as well as plenty of things to still document.

I’d like to say a huge thank you to Chris Boot, Léo Colombaro and everyone who has contributed so far. We look forward to continuing this successful collaboration.

If you need help running the NetBox Helm Chart head on over to the #netbox-chart channel in the NetDev Slack: https://netdev.chat/

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