// the find
netbox-community/netbox
The premier source of truth powering network automation. Open source under Apache 2. Try NetBox Cloud free: https://netboxlabs.com/products/free-netbox-cloud/
NetBox is a Django-based IPAM and DCIM application that acts as the authoritative record of what your network infrastructure is and should be. It models everything from IP prefixes and VLANs to physical rack layouts, cables, and power circuits. Squarely aimed at network engineers and ops teams who need a single place to define intended state before automation tooling (Ansible, Terraform, etc.) acts on it.
The data model is genuinely deep — cable traces, power distribution, FHRP groups, VPN tunnels, and wireless are all first-class objects with proper relationships, not afterthoughts bolted onto a generic CMDB. The REST and GraphQL APIs are auto-generated from the model, so they stay in sync without manual effort and are well-documented via the included OpenAPI schema. The plugin system is real: you can introduce new Django models, views, API endpoints, and background jobs without forking the core, which matters for long-term maintainability. Change logging is automatic and attached to every object — you get a full audit trail with request IDs grouping related changes, which ops teams will actually use.
The installation story is still bare-metal Django: you're managing PostgreSQL, Redis, gunicorn, and a separate RQ worker process yourself, and the docs walk you through this with systemd unit files. There's no official container-native deployment path beyond community-maintained Helm charts. The custom scripts and event rules feature is powerful but runs synchronously in the web process by default, which is a footgun for anyone who writes a script that does real work. The UI is functional but dense — rack and cable views are genuinely useful, but the forms for complex objects (device types with module bays and templates) require a lot of clicks and are not something you want to use for bulk onboarding.