Installing NetBox on Ubuntu 20.04

NetBox requires PostgreSQL 10 or later. Please note that MySQL and other relational databases are not supported.

PostgreSQL Database Installation

# sudo apt update
# sudo apt install -y postgresql

Once PostgreSQL has been installed, start the service and enable it to run at boot:

# sudo systemctl start postgresql
# sudo systemctl enable postgresql

Database Creation

At a minimum, we need to create a database for NetBox and assign it a username and password for authentication. Start by invoking the PostgreSQL shell as the system Postgres user.

# sudo -u postgres psql

Within the shell, enter the following commands to create the database and user (role), substituting your own value for the password:

CREATE DATABASE netbox;
CREATE USER netbox WITH PASSWORD 'netbox123';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE netbox TO netbox;

Do not use the password from the example. Choose a strong, random password to ensure secure database authentication for your NetBox installation.

Once complete, enter \q to exit the PostgreSQL shell.

Redis Installation

Redis is an in-memory key-value store which NetBox employs for caching and queuing. This section entails the installation and configuration of a local Redis instance. Redis v4.0 or later required.

# sudo apt install -y redis-server

Before continuing, verify that your installed version of Redis is at least v4.0:

# redis-server -v

You may wish to modify the Redis configuration at /etc/redis.conf or /etc/redis/redis.conf , however in most cases the default configuration is sufficient.

# sudo systemctl start redis-server.service

Verify Service Status

Use the redis-cli utility to ensure the Redis service is functional:

# redis-cli ping

If successful, you should receive a PONG response from the server.

NetBox Installation

This section of the documentation discusses installing and configuring the NetBox application itself.

Install System Packages

Begin by installing all system packages required by NetBox and its dependencies. Python 3.8 or later required

# sudo apt install -y python3 python3-pip python3-venv python3-dev build-essential libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libffi-dev libpq-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev

Before continuing, check that your installed Python version is at least 3.8:

# python3 -V

Download NetBox

This documentation provides two options for installing NetBox: from a downloadable archive, or from the git repository. Installing from a package (option A below) requires manually fetching and extracting the archive for every future update, whereas installation via git (option B) allows for seamless upgrades by re-pulling the master branch.

Option A: Download a Release Archive

Download the latest stable release from GitHub as a tarball or ZIP archive and extract it to your desired path. In this example, we'll use /opt/netbox as the NetBox root.

# sudo wget https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/archive/vX.Y.Z.tar.gz
# sudo tar -xzf vX.Y.Z.tar.gz -C /opt
# sudo ln -s /opt/netbox-X.Y.Z/ /opt/netbox

Option B: Clone the Git Repository

Create the base directory for the NetBox installation. For this guide, we'll use /opt/netbox.

# sudo mkdir -p /opt/netbox/
# cd /opt/netbox/

if git is not already installed, install it:

# sudo apt install -y git

Next, clone the master branch of the NetBox GitHub repository into the current directory. (This branch always holds the current stable release.)

sudo git clone -b master --depth 1 https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox.git .

The git clone command should generate output similar to the following:

Cloning into '.'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 996, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (996/996), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (935/935), done.
remote: Total 996 (delta 148), reused 386 (delta 34), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (996/996), 4.26 MiB | 9.81 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (148/148), done.

Create the NetBox System User

Create a system user account named netbox . We'll configure the WSGI and HTTP services to run under this account. We'll also assign this user ownership of the media directory. This ensures that NetBox will be able to save uploaded files.