Wow. Over the weekend, NetBox officially surpassed 10 thousand stars on GitHub! This was not something I ever anticipated when DigitalOcean agreed to release NetBox as open source back in 2016, but it demonstrates just how much impact a project can have when it finds the right community and solves the right problems.
Admittedly, GitHub stars aren’t a terribly meaningful metric: Someone can star a repo but not necessarily use it, and vice versa. But as an open source project without any more tangible means to track effective deployments or customers, it’s one of the few objective metrics we have by which to evaluate the project’s growth. And it does provide a reasonable bellwether indicating how NetBox stacks up against similar projects.
So where does that put NetBox? Amazingly, we’re currently ranked #241 of all Python projects on GitHub, and we’re in the #1 spot for both the ipam and dcim topics by a wide margin. Not bad for a project that was released less than six years ago.
I recently started using Orbit (an excellent tool!) to track community engagement through both GitHub and Slack. Orbit has been a boon in helping to highlight newly engaged users and draw attention to some of our most active contributors. It also provides rich statistics that complement what little data we can get from GitHub.
As you can see, NetBox’s growth has remained fairly constant since a few months after its initial release, even trending upward a bit since being sponsored by NS1 last year.
So what’s next for NetBox? Well, v3.2 is right around the corner, bringing a greatly enhanced plugins framework, device modules, additional customization options, and lots more – and that’s just the first of three major releases planned this year! At the same time, we’re continuing to grow NetBox Cloud at NS1 both in size and feature set. I expect 2022 to be our busiest year yet with NetBox, by far.
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who uses NetBox today. Your contributions, feedback, and support have made the project what it is today, and continue to power its success.
Now, on to 20,000 stars!
