HOWTO: Deploy NetBox as the Authoritative Platform Record¶

Purpose: Deploy NetBox as the live authority in the on-prem reference scenario, seed its data model, and publish structured inventory for downstream operations.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Track: Platform Services

Overview¶

The authoritative on-prem reference scenario uses NetBox as its live record for devices, prefixes, VLANs, and sites. HybridOps resolves that authority before execution, publishes its structured outputs to downstream modules, and preserves the resolved inputs in the run record. This HOWTO covers deployment, canonical data seeding, and inventory-export verification; the NetBox Lifecycle module covers day-2 operations.

1. Module Overview¶

Module ID: platform/onprem/bootstrap-netbox@v1.
Components: NetBox application, PostgreSQL backend, Redis, reverse proxy.
Idempotency: safe to re-run for config drift correction.

2. Prerequisites¶

VM provisioned in management VLAN with a static IP from IPAM.
PostgreSQL instance available (standalone or shared with other services).
DNS entry or /etc/hosts entry for the NetBox hostname.

3. Module Inputs¶

NetBox version.
Database connection details.
Redis connection details.
Admin user bootstrap credentials (secret reference).
Site and tenant seed data path.

4. Seeding the Initial Data Model¶

Sites and tenants aligned with ADR-0002.
VLAN definitions from ADR-0101.
Prefix allocations and gateway IPs.
Device roles and platform definitions.

5. API Token Provisioning¶

Creating a read-only automation token.
Binding token permissions to required object types.
Storing the token in the secrets manager.

6. Inventory Export Wiring¶

Running make inventory.netbox-export post-deployment.
Validating Ansible and Nornir inventory output.
CI/CD freshness check configuration.

References¶

License: MIT-0 for code, CC-BY-4.0 for documentation unless otherwise stated.