NetBox Rack Design

Plan rack changes as versioned designs — on top of your real NetBox data, without touching it until you're ready.

NetBox Rack Design adds a lightweight design layer to NetBox for planning device adds, moves, and removals in your racks. A Design is a named, versioned proposal that overlays your live DCIM data: your real dcim.Device and dcim.Rack records stay untouched, and each planned change — add, move, or remove — is captured as a structured placement instead of a spreadsheet cell. This brings the intended rack layout into NetBox and renders it as a projected rack elevation, with an explicit Apply step, conflict detection, and power projection arriving in later stages.

The plugin is fully generic and public — nothing organization-specific is hardcoded. Status names and behavior are driven entirely by PLUGINS_CONFIG, and only native NetBox mechanisms are used (change logging, tags, custom fields, permissions, REST + GraphQL APIs, global search).

Features

Rack Design pairs a structured data model with an interactive visual editor for composing rack plans. The apply/conflict/power features are planned (see Roadmap).

• Three models for capturing rack plans:
  • Design — a proposed set of rack changes for a site, scoped to one or more racks. Versioned (clone-and-tweak, with one approved version per plan), ordered for execution per site via an auto-assigned sequence, may declare explicit depends_on relationships, and may optionally belong to a group. Carries title, status, summary, generic external link, plus description/comments/tags/custom fields.
  • DesignGroup — an optional, hierarchical container that links related designs into a larger effort (multi-stage work or cross-site coordination). Purely organizational; never affects execution order.
  • DesignPlacement — a single proposed change within a design: add a new device from the device-type catalog (with an intended role and tenant), move an existing device, or remove (planned) one. Target slots are validated against NetBox's own Rack.get_available_units() collision logic. Real devices are never mutated.
• Interactive multi-rack visual editor — a GridStack drag-and-drop editor that renders all of a design's racks side by side, across both front and rear faces, for composing adds/moves/removes. Includes a searchable device-type catalog palette, per-user favorite device types for quick access, and per-user rack visibility to focus the workspace. Every edit writes placements only — live devices are never touched.
• Projected rack elevations — a read-only elevation view showing how a design's racks would look once applied (all racks, both faces, full-depth devices rendered across both faces), plus a filterable elevations list.
• Rack-page integration — an optional panel on the core dcim.rack detail page listing the designs that touch that rack, each linking to its editor and elevation.
• Config-driven statuses — which device statuses count as "planned" and which mark a planned removal are read from PLUGINS_CONFIG, never hardcoded.
• Full CRUD UI with list/detail/edit/bulk views and a navigation menu.
• REST API at /api/plugins/rack-design/.
• GraphQL API integration.
• Global search integration.
• Change logging, tags, and custom fields on the models.
• Integration with NetBox's native permission system.

Screenshots

Screenshots coming soon. In the meantime, see the documentation for the editor and elevation views.

Compatibility

Plugin Version	Minimum NetBox Version	Maximum NetBox Version	Python
0.7.0	4.4.0	4.4.99	3.12+

The supported NetBox range is enforced at load time via the plugin's min_version / max_version. See COMPATIBILITY.md for the full per-version matrix.

Dependencies

• NetBox 4.4.0 – 4.4.99
• Python 3.12 or later

No additional Python packages are required beyond NetBox's own dependencies.

Installation

Install from PyPI into the same environment as your NetBox installation:

pip install netbox-rack-design

For NetBox Docker, add netbox-rack-design to your plugin_requirements.txt. See the netbox-docker plugin instructions.

Enable the plugin in your NetBox configuration (configuration.py, or plugins.py for netbox-docker):

PLUGINS = [
    "netbox_rack_design",
]

# Optional — defaults shown. Only include keys you want to override.
PLUGINS_CONFIG = {
    "netbox_rack_design": {
        "planned_statuses": ["planned"],
        "removal_statuses": ["decommissioning"],
        "default_status": "draft",
        "enable_rack_panel": True,
    },
}

Note on removal_statuses. The default decommissioning is the only native removal-oriented device status on a vanilla install. If decommissioning is destructive in your environment (e.g. it auto-deletes devices or triggers an external dismantle workflow), do not use it for planned removals. Instead add a safe custom status via NetBox's FIELD_CHOICES (for dcim.Device.status, e.g. to_decommission) and point removal_statuses at it.

Apply migrations and restart NetBox:

python manage.py migrate
# then restart your NetBox services (e.g. systemctl restart netbox netbox-rq)

Configuration

All settings are optional and configured under the netbox_rack_design key in PLUGINS_CONFIG.

Key	Default	Description
planned_statuses	["planned"]	Device statuses the plugin treats as "planned".
removal_statuses	["decommissioning"]	Device statuses that mark a planned removal. Override with a safe custom status where decommissioning is destructive (see note above).
default_status	"draft"	Default lifecycle status for a new Design.
enable_rack_panel	True	Show the rack-page panel listing designs that touch a rack.

Roadmap

Delivered

• Projected rack elevations (read-only) — see how a design's racks would look once applied, with front/rear faces and full-depth devices rendered across both faces.
• Interactive visual rack editor — GridStack drag-and-drop adds/moves/removes across a multi-rack workspace and both rack faces, writing placements without mutating live devices. Includes a searchable device-type catalog palette, per-user favorite device types, and per-user rack visibility.
• Multi-rack designs — a design carries an explicit, site-validated rack scope and a read-only elevation view spanning all of its racks.

Planned for upcoming stages

• Apply ("Make in NetBox") — an explicit step that materializes an approved design into real planned devices and applies removal statuses.
• Conflict detection — block approval of designs that conflict with an approved baseline, including dependency conflicts between designs.
• Power projection — config-driven capacity vs. projected consumption per design.
• Template-driven export — generate work documents from a design via NetBox's native Export Templates.

Support

• Documentation: https://ravenrs.github.io/netbox-rack-design/
• Issues / bug reports / feature requests: https://github.com/ravenrs/netbox-rack-design/issues

When reporting a bug, please include your NetBox version, plugin version, Python version, steps to reproduce, and expected vs. actual behavior.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

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This package was created with Cookiecutter and the netbox-community/cookiecutter-netbox-plugin template.