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Contrib Module

The nautobot_ssot.contrib module is a toolkit for building custom SSoT integrations syncing data from an external system into the local Nautobot instance. It provides several base classes and reusable code to perform CRUD operations against the Nautobot ORM only requiring some basic configurations. The base classes can also be extended for more advanced functionality.

You declare your data models as thin, conventional descriptions of the corresponding Nautobot models, and contrib infers the rest — loading existing data, and creating, updating, and deleting records as a synchronization requires. This is the recommended starting point whenever you build a custom integration of your own.

Background

Every SSoT integration is built on DiffSync: you model the data on both sides as DiffSync models, load each side into an adapter, and let DiffSync calculate and reconcile the differences. The direction of that reconciliation is expressed as a Nautobot Job — a DataSource (remote system into Nautobot) or a DataTarget (Nautobot into the remote system).

Writing the Nautobot side by hand means implementing load, create, update, and delete against the Nautobot ORM for every model — a large amount of repetitive boilerplate. The contrib module removes most of that work through two base classes:

  • NautobotModel — a DiffSync model base class that provides create, update, and delete against the Nautobot ORM out of the box.
  • NautobotAdapter — a DiffSync adapter base class that provides a generic load implementation, recursively traversing your models and their relationships.

Because this functionality is driven entirely by how your models are declared, the modeling conventions are the foundation everything else builds on.

Where to start

The pages in this section build on each other in order:

  1. Models — defining NautobotModel subclasses, including the different field types covered in detail in the modeling guide.
  2. Adapters — assembling a NautobotAdapter from your models and customizing how data is loaded.

Once your models and adapters are in place, see Developing Data Source and Data Target Jobs for wiring them into a runnable SSoT Job.