[matt-p]

It is not that difficult to build it into your app, if you're already storing information about hosts, networking etc. All you're really doing is expanding the scope, netbox is a fine starting point if you're willing to start there and build your systems around it, but if you've already got a system (or you need to do anything that doesn't fit netbox logic) you're probably better off just extending it.

In this case railway will need to care about a lot of extra information beyond just racks, IP addresses and physical servers.

[ca508]

correct; I think the first version of our tool sprung up in the space of a couple of weekends. It wasn't planned, my colleague Pierre who wrote it just had a lot of fun building it.

[walterbell]

Were there any promising OSS alternatives to Netbox?

[ca508]

There's a fork called nautobot that tries to add-in automation. Most things we wanted to do with either meant we had to go writing django plugins and trying to interface with their APIs (and fight with the libs). Overall just hammering together a small custom service ended up being way faster/simpler.