Issue with nb.version Returning an Empty String

[Kani999]

Issue with nb.version Returning an Empty String

Hello everyone,

I'm encountering an issue where calling nb.version consistently returns an empty string (''). This is causing problems with the Ansible nb_lookup module. The module attempts to parse the version using the following line:

netbox_versiontuple = tuple(map(int, netbox.version.split(".")))

Since the version string is empty, this causes an error.

To work around this, I modified the nb_lookup module to use the status API instead:

netbox_versiontuple = tuple(map(int, netbox.status().get('netbox-version').split(".")))

This solution works, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to modify the pynetbox/core/api.py file to handle this more gracefully. Specifically, could we update the version property to use the status API as shown below?

@property
def version(self):
    """Retrieve the NetBox version."""
    version = self.status().get('netbox-version', '')
    return version

This would replace the current implementation:

@property
def version(self):
    """Retrieve the NetBox version."""
    version = Request(
        base=self.base_url,
        http_session=self.http_session,
    ).get_version()

    return version

Additionally, I noticed that the current implementation of get_version in pynetbox/core/query.py doesn't seem to return the API-Version header. Here's the relevant portion of the code:

def get_version(self):
    """Gets the API version of NetBox.

    Issues a GET request to the base URL to read the API version from the
    response headers.

    :Raises: RequestError if req.ok returns false.
    :Returns: Version number as a string. Empty string if version is not
    present in the headers.
    """
    headers = {
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
    }
    req = self.http_session.get(
        self.normalize_url(self.base),
        headers=headers,
    )
    if req.ok or req.status_code == 403:
        return req.headers.get("API-Version", "")
    else:
        raise RequestError(req)

And here’s the output I received when inspecting the headers:

ipdb> req.headers
{'Strict-Transport-Security': 'max-age=15768000, max-age=31536000',
 'X-Content-Type-Options': 'nosniff',
 'X-Xss-Protection': '1;  mode=block',
 'X-Frame-Options': 'DENY, DENY',
 'Content-Security-Policy': "default-src 'self'; style-src 'unsafe-inline' 'self' https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com; script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'; img-src 'self'; font-src https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com; frame-ancestors 'none', frame-ancestors 'none'; base-uri 'none';",
 'Referrer-Policy': 'no-referrer-when-downgrade',
 'Cache-Control': 'no-store',
 'Content-Type': 'text/html;charset=utf-8',
 'Content-Length': '2931'}

As you can see, the API-Version header is not present in the response.

Would it be possible to update the version property to rely on the status API, or is there another recommended solution for this issue?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Kani999]

Hi everyone,

I've figured out why the nb.version property was consistently returning an empty string.

The issue stems from the fact that we're using an OIDC (OpenID Connect) proxy for authentication when connecting to NetBox. In our Apache configuration, we have the following setup:

<Location /api>
    <If "-z req('authorization')">
      Require valid-user
    </If>
    <Else>
       Require ip <IP_ADDRESS_RANGE>
    </Else>
</Location>

This configuration requires authorization for accessing the NetBox API. If the request doesn't include an authorization token, the proxy redirects the user to the login page of the OIDC provider. As a result, when the get_version method in pynetbox tries to access the API without a token, it doesn't receive the expected API-Version header. Instead, it gets redirected, which is why the version string is empty.

To solve this, we need to ensure that the token is passed to the get_version method. Here's how we can modify the pynetbox/core/api.py file to include the token when retrieving the version:

@property
def version(self):
    """Gets the API version of NetBox.

    Can be used to check the NetBox API version if there are
    version-dependent features or syntaxes in the API.

    :Returns: Version number as a string.
    :Example:

    >>> import pynetbox
    >>> nb = pynetbox.api(
    ...     'http://localhost:8000',
    ...     token='your_token_here'
    ... )
    >>> nb.version
    '3.1'
    >>>
    """
    version = Request(
        base=self.base_url,
        token=self.token,  # Ensure the token is passed here
        http_session=self.http_session,
    ).get_version()
    return version

With this change, the nb.version property will correctly retrieve the NetBox version even when the OIDC proxy is in use.

Thanks for your input, and I hope this helps anyone else encountering a similar issue!

[Kani999]

Converted to issue #640