Automated Installation of Netbox

[erempel]

In the modern world of server administration the idea of Infrastructure as Code and automated deploy I find that installation of NetBox prevents this kind of integration.

The documented installation steps of NetBox mixes configuration and installation together. The upgrade.sh script requires that at least some of the configuration be performed prior to it being used, however, some of the steps that it performs are purely based on installation, such as creating the python virtual environment and fulfilling the python requirements.

Would it be possible to separate the install tasks from the configuration tasks and provide two scripts. One for installation that would not require any configuration, and one for configuration based tasks.

My hope is that I would be able to perform the full installation as the administrator of the server (ability to run root). Then permit an application administrator to perform all of the configuration tasks as the netbox user (no ability to run root). This configuration would include all of the database administration and other configurations, but would not be able to read/write to most of the /opt/netbox filesystem.

The full intent is to create an RPM installer that would provide a sufficient installation that the netbox account could configure and run the service. This same mechanism would be used to create generic kubernetes containers that could be configured and run.

Any discussion/comments?