Required Configuration Settings¶
Redis Settings¶
Redis is an in-memory data store similar to memcached. It is required to support Nautobot's caching, task queueing, and webhook features. The connection settings are explained here, allowing Nautobot to connect to different Redis instances/databases per feature.
Warning
It is highly recommended to keep the Redis databases for caching and tasks separate. Using the same database number on the same Redis instance for both may result in queued background tasks being lost during cache flushing events. For this reason, the default settings utilize database 1 for caching and database 0 for tasks.
Tip
The default Redis settings in your nautobot_config.py should be suitable for most deployments and should only require customization for more advanced configurations.
Task Queuing with Celery¶
Added in version 1.1.0
Out of the box you do not need to make any changes to utilize task queueing with Celery. All of the default settings are sufficient for most installations.
In the event you do need to make customizations to how Celery interacts with the message broker such as for more advanced clustered deployments, the following settings may be changed:
Configuring Celery for High Availability¶
High availability clustering of Redis for use with Celery can be performed using Redis Sentinel. Please see documentation section on configuring Celery for Redis Sentinel for more information.
ALLOWED_HOSTS¶
Default:
[]
Environment Variable: NAUTOBOT_ALLOWED_HOSTS
A list of valid fully-qualified domain names (FQDNs) and/or IP addresses that can be used to reach the Nautobot service. (If provided as an environment variable, it should be a space-separated string, for example NAUTOBOT_ALLOWED_HOSTS="localhost 127.0.0.1 example.com")
Usually this is the same as the hostname for the Nautobot server, but can also be different; for example, when using a reverse proxy serving the Nautobot website under a different FQDN than the hostname of the Nautobot server. To help guard against HTTP Host header attacks, Nautobot will not permit access to the server via any other hostnames or IPs.
Keep in mind that by default Nautobot sets
USE_X_FORWARDED_HOST
to True, which means that if you're using a reverse proxy, the FQDN used to reach that reverse proxy needs
to be in this list.
Warning
This parameter must always be defined as a list or tuple, even if only a single value is provided.
Example:
Tip
If there is more than one hostname in this list, you may also need to set CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS as well.
If you are not yet sure what the domain name and/or IP address of the Nautobot installation will be, and are comfortable accepting the risks in doing so, you can set this to a wildcard (asterisk) to allow all host values:
Warning
It is not recommended to leave this value as ['*'] for production deployments.
See Also:
CACHES¶
Default:
{'default': {'BACKEND': 'django_redis.cache.RedisCache',
'LOCATION': 'redis://localhost:6379/1',
'OPTIONS': {'CLIENT_CLASS': 'django_redis.client.DefaultClient',
'PASSWORD': ''},
'TIMEOUT': 300}}
Environment Variables:
NAUTOBOT_CACHES_BACKEND
The CACHES setting is required to simplify the configuration for django-redis.
The django-redis Django plugin is used to enable Redis
as a concurrent write lock for preventing race conditions when allocating IP address objects.
Important
Nautobot also utilizes the built-in
Django cache framework
(which also relies on the CACHES setting) to perform caching.
Changed in version 2.0.0
The default value of CACHES["default"]["LOCATION"] has changed from redis://localhost:6379/0
to redis://localhost:6379/1, as Django's native caching is now taking the role previously occupied by
django-cacheops.
See Also:
DATABASES¶
Default:
{'default': {'CONN_MAX_AGE': 300,
'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
'HOST': 'localhost',
'NAME': 'nautobot',
'PASSWORD': '',
'PORT': '',
'USER': ''}}
Environment Variables:
-
NAUTOBOT_DB_TIMEOUT -
NAUTOBOT_DB_ENGINE -
NAUTOBOT_DB_HOST -
NAUTOBOT_DB_NAME -
NAUTOBOT_DB_PASSWORD -
NAUTOBOT_DB_PORT -
NAUTOBOT_DB_USER
Nautobot requires access to a supported database service to store data. This service can run locally on the Nautobot server or on a remote system.
Nautobot supports either MySQL or PostgreSQL as a database backend. You must make sure that the ENGINE
setting matches your selected database backend or you will be unable to connect to the database.
Note
Nautobot supports all database options supported by the underlying Django framework.
For a complete list of available parameters, please see the
official Django documentation on DATABASES.
Warning
By default, MySQL is case-insensitive in its handling of text strings. This is different from PostgreSQL which is case-sensitive by default. We strongly recommend that you configure MySQL to be case-sensitive for use with Nautobot, either when you enable the MySQL server, or when you create the Nautobot database in MySQL. If you follow the provided installation instructions for CentOS or Ubuntu, the recommended steps there will include the appropriate database configuration.
Tip
When using MySQL as a database backend, and you want to enable support for Unicode characters like the beloved poop emoji, you'll need to update your settings.
If you try to use emojis without this setting, you will encounter a server error along the lines of
Incorrect string value, because you are running afoul of the legacy implementation of Unicode
(aka utf8) encoding in MySQL. The utf8 encoding in MySQL is limited to 3-bytes per character.
Newer Unicode emoji require 4-bytes.
To properly support using such characters, you will need to create an entry in
DATABASES -> default -> OPTIONS with the value {"charset": "utf8mb4"} in your nautobot_config.py
and restart all Nautobot services. This will tell MySQL to always use utf8mb4 character set
for database client connections.
As of Nautobot 1.1.5 and later, if you have generated a new nautobot_config.py using
nautobot-server init, this line is already present in your config and no action is required.
See Also:
SECRET_KEY¶
Default:
""
Environment Variable: NAUTOBOT_SECRET_KEY
This is a secret, random string used to assist in the creation of new cryptographic hashes for passwords and HTTP cookies.
The key defined here should not be shared outside of the configuration file.
SECRET_KEY can be changed at any time, however be aware that doing so will invalidate all existing sessions.
SECRET_KEY should be at least 50 characters long and contain a random mix of letters, digits, and symbols.
Note
A unique SECRET_KEY is generated for you automatically when you use nautobot-server init
to create a new nautobot_config.py.
You may run nautobot-server generate_secret_key to generate a new key at any time.
Sample output:
Alternatively use the following command to generate a secret even before nautobot-server is runnable:
Example output:
Warning
In the case of a highly available installation with multiple web servers, SECRET_KEY must be identical
among all servers in order to maintain a persistent user session state.