NIPAP is an open source and powerful IP address management system built to efficiently handle large amounts of IP addresses in small to large organizations. NIPAP comes with a sleek and intuitive web based management dashboard for Network engineers and SysAdmins to use. The web interface also features a powerful Google-style search, but a CLI client is also provided for terminal centric users.

Features of Neat IP Address Planner

Some of the cool features of Neat IP Address Planner include:

  • Very fast and scalable to hundreds of thousands of prefixes
  • A stylish and intuitive web interface
  • Native support for IPv6 (full feature parity with IPv4)
  • CLI for the hardcore user
  • Native VRF support, allowing overlapping prefixes in different VRFs
  • Support for documenting individual hosts
  • Very powerful search function (featuring regexp)
  • Statistics over used and free addresses
  • Integrated audit log
  • IP address request system for automatically assigning suitable prefixes
  • XML-RPC middleware, allowing easy integration with other applications or writing
  • Flexible authentication using SQLite and/or LDAP

Client libraries for Python, Java and Oracle are available for those that want to integrate with other systems programmatically.

How To Install Neat IP Address Planner on Ubuntu / Debian

The NIPAP pre-built packages are officially provided for Debian and Debian derivatives. Here are the how to steps you need to follow.

Step 1: Add NIPAP repo

Start by adding the NIPAP repository to your Ubuntu/Debian package sources:

sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install gnupg2
echo "deb http://spritelink.github.io/NIPAP/repos/apt stable main extra" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nipap.list

Add the NIPAP public key for proper authentication of the packages provided:

wget -O - https://spritelink.github.io/NIPAP/nipap.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -

Once the repository is added, update your package lists.

sudo apt -y update

Step 2: Install PostgreSQL and ip4r extension

Let’s now install the PostgreSQL, the contrib package and the ip4r extension:

Ubuntu 18.04:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install postgresql-contrib postgresql-10-ip4r

Debian 10:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install postgresql-contrib postgresql-11-ip4r

Step 3: Install Neat IP Address Planner (NIPAP) packages on Ubuntu / Debian

The NIPAP packages installable are:

  • nipapd – Neat IP Address Planner XML-RPC daemon
  • nipap-common – A library with common stuff needed by all the other components
  • nipap-cli – A CLI client for NIPAP
  • nipap-www – A web frontend for NIPAP
  • python-pynipap – Python module for accessing NIPAP
  • python3-pynipap – Python 3 module for accessing NIPAP

Install the standard packages with the command:

sudo apt install nipapd nipap-cli nipap-www python-pynipap

Select to:

  • Database server is localhost
  • Automatically set up the database for nipapd
  • Automatically start the services

Also agree to create a user for accessing the web interface.

Automatically create user for web interface? [yes/no] yes

Step 4: Configure NIPAP Web UI

The web interface needs its own user account to authenticate towards the backend and it should be a trusted account. Create it with the following:

user="nipap-www"
password="StrongPassw3rd"
sudo nipap-passwd add --username $user --password $password --name "My User Account"

Command output is like this:

Added user nipap-www to database /etc/nipap/local_auth.db

Configure
the web UI to use this account by configuring the xmlrpc_uri variable:

$ sudo vim /etc/nipap/nipap.conf
xmlrpc_uri = http://nipap-www@local:StrongPassw3rd@127.0.0.1:1337

The configuration syntax is:

xmlrpc_uri = http://{{NIPAPD_USERNAME}}@local:{{NIPAPD_PASSWORD}}@{{NIPAPD_HOST}}:{{NIPAPD_PORT}}

Restart nipapd service.

 sudo systemctl restart nipapd.service

Other user accounts can be added using same method:

nipap-passwd add --username myuser --password mypassword --name "my user"

Serving the web UI with Apache httpd with mod_wsgi

Begin by installing Apache httpd with mod_wsgi:

sudo apt install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi

Then, add a new virtual host:

$ sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/nipap.conf

Modify / paste below data:


      ServerName nipap.example.com
      DocumentRoot /var/cache/nipap-www/
      ServerAdmin [email protected]
      WSGIScriptAlias / /etc/nipap/www/nipap-www.wsgi


    Require all granted



    Require all granted


ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/nipap_error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/nipap_access.log combined

Enable wsgi mod in Apache

sudo a2enmod wsgi

Validate your Apache configurations:

$ sudo apachectl configtest
Syntax OK

The web server needs to be able to write to its cache, alter the permissions :

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/cache/nipap-www
sudo chmod -R u=rwX /var/cache/nipap-www

Now, restart Apache httpd server:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

The NIPAP web UI should be up and running and accessible on configured domain nipap.example.com.

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Login with the credentials provided earlier.

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Network prefixes can be added from CLI or web dashboard.

Configuring CLI

Add CLI user:

sudo nipap-passwd add --username nipap-cli --password StrongPassword --name "My CLI user"

Then create your .nipaprc with username and password created above.

$ vim ~/.nipaprc
[global]
hostname = localhost
port     = 1337
username = *nipap-cli*
password = *StrongPassword*
default_vrf_rt = none
default_list_vrf_rt = all

Set file permissions:

chmod 0600 ~/.nipaprc

Try adding test prefix to confirm it works.

$ sudo nipap address add prefix 192.168.20.0/24 type assignment description "Test prefix"
Network 192.168.20.0/24 added to VRF 'default' [RT: -]: Test prefix

Confirm on UI Dashboard.

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Check the NIPAP Documentation page for more details.

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