NetBox 4.5 General Availability and Ecosystem Update
We’re pleased to announce that NetBox 4.5 is now generally available. Following a successful beta period in December, version 4.5 brings major improvements to cable modeling, API security, and object ownership. These features unlock new capabilities for managing complex infrastructure while solving operational challenges our community has identified.
Beyond the core platform release, the past quarter has seen substantial maturation across the NetBox ecosystem. Custom Objects reached general availability, our branching and change management plugins have kept pace with platform updates, NetBox Copilot is now available to all users, and we’ve introduced NetBox Designs for declarative infrastructure management.
What’s in NetBox 4.5
NetBox 4.5 brings three major feature areas: enhanced cable modeling with Cable Profiles and many-to-many port mappings for accurate representation of complex passive infrastructure, native user and group ownership for tracking operational responsibility, and a rebuilt API token system with proper credential hashing and enable/disable controls. Beyond these headline features, the release includes UI filter lookups, platform inheritance for config contexts, and support for Python 3.13 and 3.14.
For detailed coverage of all features and their operational impact, see our beta announcement from December. The full release notes cover upgrade considerations and the complete change list.
Ecosystem Progress
Custom Objects Reaches General Availability
In October 2025, Custom Objects reached general availability with v0.4.0. The plugin allows organizations to define custom object types without forking NetBox or maintaining separate systems. Asset tracking, compliance records, service definitions, or any domain-specific inventory can be modeled while maintaining integration with NetBox’s core features.
Since GA, releases v0.4.1 through v0.4.4 have improved API handling for multi-object relationships, added bulk import, introduced limited branching compatibility, and added NetBox 4.5 support.
NetBox Branching and Changes
Our collaboration workflow plugins, NetBox Branching and NetBox Changes, continue to evolve with new capabilities. The headline addition is squash merging in Branching (v0.7.4), which allows you to consolidate changes when merging branches to resolve conflicts. This matters when you’re working with complex change sets where the individual commit history becomes noise and you need a clean merge.
Beyond squash merging, recent releases have addressed operational issues including cable path recalculation during merges, event rule triggering in branched contexts, and virtual chassis modifications. NetBox Changes (v0.4.1) now includes a permission to bypass the protect_main setting for automated processes that need controlled access to the main branch, and enforces change request approval before branch merges for organizations requiring additional governance.
pynetbox
pynetbox 7.6.0 releases today with support for NetBox 4.5’s v2 API tokens. The Python client library now handles both the legacy token format and the new bearer token authentication introduced in 4.5. This release also fixes ObjectChanges module location changes that were introduced in NetBox 4.1, ensuring compatibility across recent NetBox versions.
NetBox Copilot
NetBox Copilot, our AI assistant for exploring and acting on NetBox data, is now available to all NetBox users. NetBox Copilot will feel familiar to anyone who has used other modern AI copilots. It has access to the data in NetBox and is an expert in navigating the NetBox data model to answer questions and plot courses of action. The cloud-based agent embeds directly in your NetBox instance and provides natural language access to your infrastructure data while respecting your existing permissions.
NetBox Designs: Declarative Infrastructure
Last month, we announced NetBox Designs and opened applications for design partners. The tool addresses a problem that becomes acute at scale: translating high-level network designs into the detailed objects that NetBox manages.
NetBox Designs lets you create structured, reusable design files that define everything from device configurations to complete rack deployments to entire reference architectures. The designs are composable, customizable through variables, idempotent, and version-controlled. If you’re managing infrastructure at scale in NetBox, we’d welcome your participation as a design partner.
Looking Forward
NetBox 4.5 is available now. Between the core platform improvements and the maturation of Custom Objects, Branching, and Changes, and the introduction of NetBox Copilot and NetBox Designs, the NetBox ecosystem is in its strongest position yet for managing infrastructure at scale.
More to come in 2026.
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