NetBox Designs

NetBox Designs builds infrastructure in NetBox from designs. A design is a YAML file that describes what you want: a region hierarchy, a site and its address space, or a whole rack with its devices, modules and cabling. You add the design to your organization's catalogue, plan it against a NetBox, review exactly what the plan creates, changes and deletes, and apply it. Plan the same design again and the plan is empty, because NetBox already matches it.

What you can do with Designs

• Build a rack, with its devices, modules and cables, from one design.
• Compose designs from smaller ones. A rack design uses a switch design and a server design, and device types come from the NetBox Device Type Library.
• Deploy one design many times under different names, such as one rack per row, and change, release or tear down each deployment on its own.
• See what every change does before NetBox does it, including what a delete takes with it.
• Plan into a NetBox branch, and merge the branch in NetBox when you're ready.

Requirements

• NetBox Cloud, with Designs enabled for your organization.
• A NetBox at version 4.6.0 or later, reachable from NetBox Cloud.
• A v2 API token for that NetBox, which starts nbt_, that can read everything Designs plans against, and create, change and delete the objects your designs describe.
• To plan into branches, the NetBox Branching plugin on that NetBox.

Where to start

• The tutorial takes you from connecting a NetBox through building, changing and tearing down a region hierarchy, a site and a compute rack. Everything Designs does, in thirteen chapters.
• Concepts explains plans, deployments, composition, variables and functions, using the tutorial's compute rack.
• How-to guides are the steps for one task: editing a design, planning into a branch, checking for drift, reading a plan and what to do when a NetBox is busy.
• Reference lists everything a design can say.
• Write your own designs covers authoring, including with an AI assistant.