[FR] Persist changes and/or tooling

[bslatyer]

Discussed in https://github.com/orgs/unifi-utilities/discussions/677

^{Originally posted by BeyondEvil November 27, 2025}
So, it seems an "issue" that Ubiquiti doesn't seem interested in helping solve is supporting out-of-band changes that survives factory resets or firmware upgrades.

I was thinking we take a concept out of the Kubernetes playbook called (the) operator pattern.

The tl;dr is that you have an operator (that runs externally to the Gateway/Router, for example on a Raspberry PI) that is responsible for managing the state.

This would enable managing the state with tools like Terraform/OpenTofu and other Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools.

This is particularly valuable for people managing multiple deployments.

Would the repository maintainer(s) be interested in collaborating around such a solution?

[ludmaj]

Hi, could anyone, OP of the original discussion or @bslatyer elaborate on the idea? Is the idea to have multiple deployments managed via the (I assume quite limited) Ubqts API or SSH through IaC? Or does the Org Hub allow for simpler solution to do IaC management?

[bslatyer]

Hey @ludmaj,

As I'm sure you are aware, the last I heard on this one was the following.

If you think it's viable and a good idea, I'll do some arch/design work over the xmas/new year holiday.

Initial idea, for tooling at least, is to have container orchestration.

Given that it's the holiday season, I'll have to wait it out for @BeyondEvil's PoC (who I can't seem to tag in this).

Thanks!

[BeyondEvil]

So to restate the problem I believe we're trying to solve is to persist changes to the Gateway "system" that aren't managed by te Gateway itself. Changes that commonly are wiped during an UnifiOS upgrade.

So the very very high level idea is inspired by the Kubernetes Operator Pattern and the GitOps workflow/mindset.

So essentially you'll have your known "desired state" and then the "Operator" that reconciles that state to the live environment, continuously most likely using SSH as I think the main purpose here is not to manage the Gateway itself but the external "utilities".

If the desire is to manage the Gateway itself the Ubqt API would need a lot more love and after that Terraform would likely be a much better fit.

Regardless, I'm very much still on the "design phase" of things, so I'm open to any and all ideas and inputs.

My ideas so far are to make this into a very simple container with python and paramiko, and then solve how the "desired state" would be declared and ultimately synced.

Another option is to look at Ansible, and extending that with something that specifically solves the "continuous reconciliation" problem.

Again, input is welcome!