Nautobot with Apigee Gateway

[jeffkala]

The goal of this show and tell is simply to provide short details around using Google's Apigee services as a proxy to the Nautobot API.

Tested configuration

• Api Proxy using the (Reverse Proxy) mode.
• Passthrough Authentication is the only current working solution.
• Loading the API Spec.
• Go to http://<nautobot-url>/api/docs/ and click on the hyperlink on the page or navigate to swagger

This will download the OpenAPI spec.

Back on the Apigee console when you use the Reverse Proxy mode you can directly upload the spec file, alternatively you can provide a url to the spec..

• Create a proxy configuration by adding the base path (the base path in Apigee endpoint for this proxy) for Apigee to work. Then provide the target url (which would be your Nautobot instance).

Note: This is where I had some issues and the reason for this discussion.

You can put in the target as http://<nautobot-url>/api/ and this will work fine for standard interactions with the API via curl or home grown solutions. For example you might run this curl command.

curl https://<external-ip>/nautobot-apigee/dcim/device-types/ -H "Authorization: Token aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"

However; using the target with the appended /api/ will break pynautobot and other SDKs. Because these SDKs take a base_url and automatically append /api/ it will break the proxy API configuration. An error as seen below would happen.

>>> url = "https://<external-ip>/nautobot-apigee/"
>>> nautobot = api(url=url, token=token)
>>> nautobot.version
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/jeffkala/.virtualenvs/venv-adhoc/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pynautobot/core/api.py", line 112, in version
    version = Request(
  File "/Users/jeffkala/.virtualenvs/venv-adhoc/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pynautobot/core/query.py", line 192, in get_version
    raise RequestError(req)
pynautobot.core.query.RequestError: The requested url: https://<external-ip>/nautobot-apigee/api/ could not be found.

Note: The exception shows /api/ was automatically appended to the url.

In order to fix this you can simply change the target in your Apigee configuration to http://<nautobot-url>/, once this is completed and the Apigee configuration is deployed, the SDKs will start working.

>>> from pynautobot import api
>>> nautobot = api(url=url, token=token)
>>> nautobot.status()['nautobot-version']
'1.5.0'

This does mean you'd have to change the way you'd interact when are integrating directly with the API, to revisit the curl example above you'd now need to include /api in that url.

curl https://<external-ip>/nautobot-apigee/api/dcim/device-types/ -H "Authorization: Token aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"

Hopefully this helps some folks get started with Apigee if its a requirement for your deployment.