To precisely meet the needs of network and infrastructure engineers, DigitalOcean NetBox was created. At Bobcares, with our DigitalOcean Managed Service, we can handle your NetBox issues.

NetBox Digital Ocean | Setup Guide

NetBox is an application designed to empower network automation along with infrastructure resource modeling (IRM) as well as IP address management (IPAM). It is available as open source under the Apache 2 license. NetBox includes Equipment racks, Devices, Connections, Virtualization, and Data circuits. However, it doesn’t provide Network monitoring, DNS server, RADIUS server, Configuration management, and Facilities management.

Softwares Included(version in the bracket) :

• PostgreSQL(12.5)
• nginx(1.18)
• gunicorn(20.0.4)
• Redis(3.5.3)
• Django(3.1.3)

Now let’s discuss the setup of Netbox on Digital Ocean.

Installing DigitalOcean NetBox

We can create the app via Control Panel or DigitalOcean API. Here, we use the Digital Ocean API to create a 4GB NetBox Droplet in the SFO2 region. Also, save the API access token to an environment variable or substitute it into the command below.

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-H 'Authorization: Bearer '$TOKEN'' -d \
'{"name":"choose_a_name","region":"sfo2","size":"s-2vcpu-4gb","image": "netverity-netbox-20-04"}' \
"https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets"

Getting started

The NetBox web UI will be accessible at https://your_droplet_public_ipv4/ once the instance has been created. Then we can access the system shell using SSH:

ssh root@your_droplet_public_ipv4

The instance is not suitable for production use since it is provisioned by a self-signed TLS certificate. So we have to replace it with the below steps.

• Firstly, update the server_name parameter in /etc/nginx/sites-available/netbox.
• Then create a DNS A record for the domain pointing to this server.
• Now run the following: sudo certbot –nginx -d $DOMAINNAME.
• Finally, reload nginx with the command, systemctl reload nginx.

This image does not automatically provision any NetBox user accounts for security reasons. Follow these instructions on the system console to create a superuser account to log in:

source /opt/netbox/venv/bin/activate
python /opt/netbox/netbox/manage.py createsuperuser

Then we can update NetBox to the most recent version with the below command:

cd /opt/netbox
sudo git pull origin master
sudo upgrade.sh

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Conclusion

To conclude, our Support team went over the Digital Ocean NetBox details including its installation and basic setup.