Installing Netbox on NixOS Latest

Netbox is a popular open-source IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool. Netbox is available for installation on a variety of platforms, including NixOS.

In this tutorial, we will guide you through the installation process of Netbox on NixOS Latest.

Prerequisites

To install Netbox on NixOS Latest, you will need:

  • A new or existing installation of NixOS Latest
  • Basic knowledge of how to use and configure a Linux server
  • An administrator account or root access to your server

Installing the Required Packages

Before starting with the Netbox installation on NixOS, we need to install some required packages. First, open a terminal and run the following command as an administrator:

sudo su

Next, install the following packages:

nix-env -i python3 python3-pip gcc libxslt libxml2 libffi openssl postgresql_12

The python3-pip package is required for installing additional Python packages. The gcc, libxslt, libxml2, libffi, and openssl packages are required for building Python packages like psycopg2 and pyopenssl. And finally, we need the postgresql_12 package for setting up the PostgreSQL database for Netbox.

Setting up the PostgreSQL Database

Next, we need to set up the PostgreSQL database for Netbox. To do this, login as the postgres user and create a new database and user:

sudo su - postgres
createdb netbox
psql -c "CREATE USER netbox WITH PASSWORD '<password>';"
psql -c "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE netbox TO netbox;"
exit

Replace <password> with a strong password for the netbox user.

Installing Netbox

Now, we can proceed with the Netbox installation. Start by cloning the Netbox repository from GitHub:

git clone -b v3.1.7 --depth 1 https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox.git
cd netbox/

The v3.1.7 branch is the current stable release of Netbox at the time of writing this tutorial. You can check for the latest release on the Netbox GitHub page.

Next, create a Python virtual environment and activate it:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Now, let’s install the required Python packages:

pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Next, we need to create a configuration file for Netbox:

cd netbox/
cp netbox/netbox/configuration.example.py netbox/netbox/configuration.py

Open the configuration.py file in your preferred text editor and modify the following settings:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']
DATABASE = {
    'NAME': 'netbox',
    'USER': 'netbox',
    'PASSWORD': '<password>',
    'HOST': 'localhost',
    'PORT': '',
    'CONN_MAX_AGE': 300,
    'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
}

Replace <password> with the password you set earlier for the netbox database user.

Running Netbox

We are now ready to start Netbox on NixOS. First, let’s create the static files:

cd netbox/
sudo python3 manage.py collectstatic --no-input

Next, we can start the Netbox development server:

sudo python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

You should now be able to access Netbox by going to http://:8000/ in your web browser.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Netbox on NixOS Latest. Netbox is a powerful tool for managing IP addresses and infrastructure, and can be customized to fit your specific needs.