NetBox DNS is incompatible with NetBox Branching

[peteeckel]

NetBox DNS is incompatible with the NetBox Branching plugin in version 0.5.1

Do not install the Branching plugin if you are using NetBox DNS.

There are currently at some issues in NetBox Branching that make using it with NetBox DNS impossible. Furthermore, it is still unclear what changes have to be done within NetBox DNS to make it compatible.

will continue to test as soon as new versions become available and remove this warning as soon as compatibility is verified. At the moment, there is no way of using both plugins together. I'm deeply sorry about this bad news because I am really looking forward to being able to use branching with NetBox DNS, but at the moment there is nothing I can do except testing and opening issues.

[wohali]

Thanks for the heads up, @peteeckel . Are links available to issues (here or against Netbox) that we can follow along to see what progress is being made? Thanks!

[peteeckel]

Unfortunately there are many open issues of which none can be picked as the blocking issue by itself.

When you have a look at https://github.com/netboxlabs/netbox-branching/issues you'll see what I mean. Many of the probelms stem from the fact that - like NetBox itself, and some other plugins as well - NetBox DNS relies a lot on things happening in the background when other actions are triggered.

For example, when you change a zone's nameservers, after the update to the zone itself its NS records need to be updated. While this seems like a trivial task, it involves a signal handler for an m2m_changed event to be called by Django. For this to happen in a proper database context for a branch, the handler needs to know the branch, and I currently have no idea how to get that information to it - see netboxlabs/netbox-branching#131 (as of yet unanswered).

The same applies to non-M2M interactions - NetBox DNS frequently updates objects when objects of other classes change, and it's necessary to pass these change operations the correct database connection for this to play well inside a branch. Unfortunately it's not really clear in which cases exactly that needs to be taken care of, and there is no proper documentation yet either. Adding this kind of code in all places where it might be necessary is nothing I would care to do, so I hope for some documentation to be provided in the near future.

Then you'll see a some issues related to custom scripts. Many of the integrations done with NetBox DNS involve custom scripts, so it's indirectly affected by the problem that scripts currently don't play well with branches.

Even internal functionality of NetBox is not safe in the context of branching - see netboxlabs/netbox-branching#178, netboxlabs/netbox-branching#175, netboxlabs/netbox-branching#174, netboxlabs/netbox-branching#155 or netboxlabs/netbox-branching#136 for some recent examples.

Given the fact that there are still some issues with NetBox core itself when you use branching, I decided to postpone dedicated work to achieve compatibility until netbox-branching has stabilised. At the current time I regard it an early beta and not suited for production use yet.

That said, there already have been some efforts to iron out obvious no-gos with branching, most notably #408, which removed an anti-pattern known to break with branches. More optimisations like this are planned or have already happened under the hood, so I hope NetBox DNS can be made compatible with branching without too much effort once it's stable.

It would already be a big help it it were possible to mark a plugin as branching aware, so you could have branching installed together with NetBox DNS without one breaking the other. I thought I saw an FR for this earlier but couldn't find it now, so I opened netboxlabs/netbox-branching#182 for it.