Installing NAV from source code

This is a generic guide to installing NAV from source code on a *NIX flavored operating system. The specifics of how to install NAV’s dependencies, such as PostgreSQL or Graphite will be entirely up to you and your choice of OS.

Dependencies

This section specifies what software packages are needed to build and run NAV. Be aware that many of these packages have dependencies of their own.

Build requirements

To build NAV, you need at least the following:

  • Python >= 3.9.0

  • Sphinx >= 1.0 (for building this documentation)

Runtime requirements

To run NAV, these software packages are required:

  • Apache2 + mod_wsgi (or, really, any web server that supports the WSGI interface)

  • PostgreSQL >= 13 (With the hstore extension available)

  • Graphite

  • Python >= 3.9.0

  • nbtscan = 1.5.1

  • dhcping (only needed if using DHCP service monitor)

PostgreSQL and Graphite are services that do not necessarily need to run on the same server as NAV.

The required Python modules can be installed either from your OS package manager, or from the Python Package Index (PyPI) using the regular setup.py method described below. The packages can also be installed from PyPI in a separate step, using the pip tool and the provided requirements and constraints files:

pip install -r requirements.txt -c constraints.txt

However, some of the required modules are C extensions that will require the presence of some C libraries to be correctly built (unless PyPI provides binary wheels for your platform). These include the psycopg2 driver and the python-ldap and Pillow modules.

The current Python requirements are as follows:

Django>=3.2,<3.3

# for debian build-deps, see the apt-get commands in
# Dockerfile

asciitree==0.3.3  # optional, for naventity
psycopg2==2.9.9  # requires libpq to build
IPy==1.01
pyaml

twisted>=23.8.0,<24.0

networkx==2.6.3
# Cannot be removed as long as qrcode is included
Pillow>3.3.2
qrcode>7.4
pyrad==2.1
sphinx==7.4.7
sphinxcontrib-programoutput==0.17
sphinxcontrib-django
# Needed for autogenerated docs
Markdown==3.3.6

feedparser==6.0.8
dnspython<3.0.0,>=2.1.0

django-filter>=2
djangorestframework>=3.12,<3.13
django-crispy-forms>=1.8,<1.9
crispy-forms-foundation>=0.7,<0.8

# REST framework
iso8601

pynetsnmp-2>=0.1.10

# libsass for compiling scss files to css using distutils/setuptools
libsass==0.15.1

napalm==3.4.1

git+https://github.com/Uninett/drf-oidc-auth@v4.0#egg=drf-oidc-auth

# The following modules are really sub-requirements of Twisted, not of
# NAV directly.  They may be optional from Twisted's point of view,
# but they are required for parts of the Twisted library that NAV uses:
#
# PyOpenSSL is required for TLS verification during PaloAlto API GET operations
PyOpenSSL==23.3.0
# service-identity is required to make TLS communication libraries shut up about potential MITM attacks
service-identity==21.1.0

requests

pyjwt>=2.6.0

Installing NAV

To build and install NAV and all its Python dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt -c constraints.txt .

This will build and install NAV in the default system-wide directories for your system. If you wish to customize the install locations, please consult the output of python setup.py install --help.

Initializing the configuration

NAV will look for its configuration files in various locations on your file system. These locations can be listed by running:

nav config path

To install a set of pristine NAV configuration files into one of these locations, e.g. in /etc/nav, run:

nav config install /etc/nav

To verify that NAV can find its main configuration file, run:

nav config where

Initializing the database

Before NAV can run, the database schema must be installed in your PostgreSQL server. NAV can create a database user and a database schema for you.

Choose a password for your NAV database user and set this in the userpw_nav in the db.conf config file. As the postgres superuser, run the following command:

navsyncdb -c

This will attempt to create a new database user, a new database and initialize it with NAV’s schema.

Configuring the web interface

NAV’s web interface is implemented using the Django framework, and can be served in any web server environment supported by Django (chiefly, any environment that supports WSGI). This guide is primarily concerned with Apache 2.

An example configuration file for Apache2 is provided the configuration directory, apache/apache.conf.example. This configuration uses mod_wsgi to serve the NAV web application, and can be modified to suit your installation paths. Once complete, it can be included in your virtualhost config, which needn’t contain much more than this:

ServerName nav.example.org
ServerAdmin webmaster@example.org

Include /path/to/your/nav/apache.conf

Important

You should always protect your NAV web site using SSL!

Installing static resources

You want your web server to be able to serve all of NAV’s static resources. You can install all of them by issuing the following command:

# django-admin collectstatic --settings=nav.django.settings
You have requested to collect static files at the destination
location as specified in your settings:

    /usr/share/nav/www/static

This will overwrite existing files!
Are you sure you want to do this?

Type 'yes' to continue, or 'no' to cancel:

In this example, type yes, hit Enter, and ensure your web server’s document root points to /usr/share/nav/www, because that is where the static directory is located. If that doesn’t suit you, you will at least need an Alias to point the /static URL to the static directory.

Users and privileges

Apart from the pping and snmptrapd daemons, no NAV processes should ever be run as root. You should create a non-privileged system user and group, and ensure the NAV_USER option in nav.conf is set accordingly. Also make sure this user has permissions to write to the directories configured in PID_DIR, LOG_DIR and UPLOAD_DIR.

Note

The pping and snmptrapd daemons must be started as root to be able to create privileged communication sockets. Both daemons will drop privileges and run as the configured non-privileged user as soon as the sockets have been acquired.

Building the documentation

If you wish, this HTML documentation can be built separately using this step:

python setup.py build_sphinx

The resulting files will typically be placed in build/sphinx/html/.

If you want to serve this documentation on your NAV web server, you should copy the html directory to a suitable location and make sure that location is served as /doc on the web server. If using the example Apache configuration (apache.conf.example), there is a define named documentation_path, which can be set to point to this file system location.