v4.0-beta1 - 2024-04-03

Warning

This is a beta release of NetBox intended for testing and evaluation. Do not use this software in production. Also be aware that no upgrade path is provided to future releases.

Tip

Plugin maintainers: Please see the dedicated plugin migration guide for a checklist of changes that may be needed to ensure compatibility with NetBox v4.0.

Breaking Changes

• Support for Python 3.8 and 3.9 has been removed.
• The format for GraphQL query filters has changed. Please see the GraphQL documentation for details and examples.
• The deprecated device_role & device_role_id filters for devices have been removed. (Use role and role_id instead.)
• The obsolete device_role field has been removed from the REST API serializer for devices. (Use role instead.)
• The legacy reports functionality has been dropped. Reports will be automatically converted to custom scripts on upgrade.
• The parent and parent_id filters for locations now return only immediate children of the specified location. (Use ancestor and ancestor_id to return all descendants.)
• The object_type field on the CustomField model has been renamed to related_object_type.
• The utilities.utils module has been removed and its resources reorganized into separate modules organized by function.
• The obsolete NullableCharField class has been removed. (Use Django's stock CharField class with null=True instead.)

New Features

Complete UI Refresh (#12128)

The NetBox user interface has been completely refreshed and updated. This massive effort entailed:

• Refactoring the base HTML templates
• Moving from Boostrap 5.0 to Bootstrap 5.3
• Adopting the Tabler UI theme
• Replacing slim-select with Tom-Select
• Displaying additional object attributes in dropdown form fields
• Enabling opt-in HTMX-powered navigation (see #14736)
• Widespread cleanup & standardization of UI components

Dynamic REST API Fields (#15087)

The REST API now supports specifying which fields to include in the response data. For example, the response to a request for

GET /api/dcim/sites/?fields=name,status,region,tenant

will include only the four specified fields in the representation of each site. Additionally, the underlying database queries effected by such requests have been optimized to omit fields which are not included in the response, resulting in a substantial performance improvement.

Strawberry GraphQL Engine (#9856)

The GraphQL engine has been changed from using Graphene-Django to Strawberry-Django. Changes include:

• Queryset Optimizer - reduces the number of database queries when querying related tables
• Updated GraphiQL Browser
• The format for GraphQL query filters and lookups has changed. Please see the GraphQL documentation for details and examples.

Advanced Form Rendering Functionality (#14739)

New resources have been introduced to enable advanced form rendering without a need for custom HTML templates. These include:

• FieldSet - Represents a grouping of form fields (replaces the use of lists/tuples)
• InlineFields - Multiple fields rendered on a single row
• TabbedGroups - Fieldsets rendered under navigable tabs within a form
• ObjectAttribute - Renders a read-only representation of a particular object attribute (for reference)

Legacy Admin UI Disabled (#12325)

The legacy admin user interface is now disabled by default, and the few remaining views it provided have been relocated to the primary UI. NetBox deployments which still depend on the legacy admin functionality for plugins can enable it by setting the DJANGO_ADMIN_ENABLED configuration parameter to true.

Enhancements

• #12776 - Introduce the htmx_talble template tag to simplify the rendering of embedded tables
• #12851 - Replace the deprecated Bleach HTML sanitization library with nh3
• #13283 - Display additional context on API-backed dropdown form fields (e.g. object descriptions)
• #13918 - Add facility field to Location model
• #14237 - Automatically clear dependent selection form fields when modifying a parent selection
• #14279 - Make the current request available as context when running custom validators
• #14454 - Include member devices in the REST API representation of virtual chassis
• #14637 - Upgrade to Django 5.0
• #14672 - Add support for Python 3.12
• #14728 - The plugins list view has been moved from the legacy admin UI to the main NetBox UI
• #14729 - All background task views have been moved from the legacy admin UI to the main NetBox UI
• #14736 - Introduce a user preference to enable HTMX-powered navigation
• #14438 - Track individual custom scripts as database objects
• #15131 - Automatically annotate related object counts on REST API querysets
• #15237 - Ensure consistent filtering ability for all model fields by testing for missing/incorrect filters
• #15238 - Include the description field in "brief" REST API serializations
• #15278 - BaseModelSerializer now takes a nested keyword argument allowing it to represent a related object
• #15383 - Standardize filtering logic for the parents of recursively-nested models (parent & ancestor filters)
• #15413 - The global search engine now supports caching of non-field object attributes
• #15490 - Custom validators can now reference related object attributes via dotted paths

Other Changes

• #10587 - Enable pagination and filtering for custom script logs
• #12325 - The Django admin UI is now disabled by default (set DJANGO_ADMIN_ENABLED to True to enable it)
• #12510 - Dropped support for legacy reports
• #12795 - NetBox now uses custom User and Group models rather than the stock models provided by Django
• #13647 - Squash all database migrations prior to v3.7
• #14092 - Remove backward compatibility for importing plugin resources from extras.plugins (now netbox.plugins)
• #14638 - Drop support for Python 3.8 and 3.9
• #14657 - Remove backward compatibility for old permissions mapping under ActionsMixin
• #14658 - Remove backward compatibility for importing process_webhook() from extras.webhooks_worker (now extras.webhooks.send_webhook())
• #14740 - Remove the obsolete BootstrapMixin form mixin class
• #15042 - The logic for registering models & model features now executes under the ready() method of individual app configs, rather than relying on the class_prepared signal
• #15099 - Remove obsolete device_role and device_role_id filters for devices
• #15100 - Remove obsolete NullableCharField class
• #15154 - The installation documentation been extended to include instructions and an example configuration file for uWSGI as an alternative to gunicorn
• #15193 - Switch to compiled distribution of the psycopg library
• #15277 - Replace references to ContentType without ObjectType proxy model & standardize field names
• #15292 - Remove obsolete device_role attribute from Device model (this field was renamed to role in v3.6)
• #15357 - The object_type field on the CustomField model has been renamed to related_object_type to avoid confusion with its object_types field
• #15401 - PostgreSQL indexes and sequence tables for the relocated L2VPN models (see #14311) have been renamed
• #15462 - Relocate resources from the utilities.utils module
• #15464 - The many-to-many relationships for ObjectPermission are now defined on the custom User and Group models