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Nautobot Remote Validation

In this post I'm going to dive into a bit more on the Nautobot custom validators. This is a powerful validation tool that will allow for you to write your own validation capability, including in this demonstration on how to complete a validation against a remote API endpoint. The custom validators are a part of the Nautobot App extension capability. This allows for custom code to be written to validate data upon the clean() method being called, which is used in the majority of API calls and form inputs of Nautobot.

Slack Canvas

Newly released (at some point anyway) is Slack Canvas, what looks to be a little bit of on demand wiki, collaboration space, and possibly (based on marketing materials) workflow organizer. This came to light as a "pop up" when I went into a Slack window on my mobile. Being a curious person and someone that is willing to try out new things I jumped right in.

Poetry Fix

The Python Poetry is our go to package management system thus far, you can see that in all of the Python projects that Network to Code open sources, such as Nautobot, pyntc, network-importer, and NTC-Templates. Lately though, I've been having some challenges when my HomeBrew updates happen and my system Python gets updated. I've been able to recover with the help of the same few pages I land on from my Google searches. But since I've done this twice now, I'm using this post to document the fix as much as for myself, but for anyone else that may come across Poetry issues.

Nautobot Secrets - Hashicorp Vault

With Nautobot, one of the things that came up was how to work with secrets. Nautobot itself is not the place to maintain secrets, as it is not a vault. There may be some good cryptographic libraries out to handle this, but by its nature, that is not the intent. So Nautobot has written methods to be able to retrieve secrets from proper vault sources and be able to leverage them. These can be tricky to get set up however. I had struggled for a while myself. So now that I have it working, I thought it would be a good time to have a quick personal blog about it.

Nautobot Jobs in Jobs Root

Today I was working to demonstrate how to get started with Nautobot Jobs within the Jobs root of Nautobot. This is not a pattern that I develop often, as I am typically developing Jobs within a plugin as my development standard. More to come on that later. During this case, the ask was to build a Job that would connect to a network device. I had a few troubles that I didn't want to have to work through on a call that had limited time and that was a screen share. So I am taking to working on this via a blog post to share, and hopefully will be helpful for others as well.

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Moving to Hugo

In this post I dive into more about my migration of the blog site to Hugo static content system. I will dive into primarily the why and how during this post. This also dives into the few changes that I had to make in order to make the change over from a Jekyll site to the Hugo site.

Nautobot IP Provisioning

One of the great things about building an enterprise system, is being able to get systems to work cohesively amongst themselves to bring a complete solution. One of the workflows that is often required in a static IP address environment is the need to provide static IP addresses to hosts on a network segment. When using an IPAM (IP Address Management) solution such as Nautobot, the APIs and SDKs/modules made available for use in automation workflows is paramount to having the cohesion to make a seamless IT system.

In this post I will be diving into the use of Nautobot as the IPAM. Using Ansible and the Nautobot modules, I will then show how you can get the next available IP address and assign it for use to the next VM. There will likely need to be some minor tweaks for use in your system.

GraphQL - Aliasing

One of the features that I find myself using periodically that I think is underrated as far as using GraphQL is its ability to alias return keys in the response. This can be extremely helpful for developers writing applications, as it allows them to have the API response with the keys they are looking for. I have found this feature particularly useful when working on applications like Meraki and Nautobot together. In Nautobot a place is typically defined as the key site. In the Meraki world this is commonly set up as a network. Without GraphQL's alias feature, the developer would need to translate this data over.

Let's explore two scenarios where a developer might choose to alias the response from GraphQL:

  • Quick translation between systems
  • Response from multiple queries

I will demonstrate the capabilities of these scenarios using the Nautobot demo instance at https://demo.nautobot.com. For each of these, make sure that you have logged in already before going to the GraphiQL page.