Skip to content

Custom Links

Custom links allow users to display arbitrary hyperlinks to external content within Nautobot object views. These are helpful for cross-referencing related records in systems outside of Nautobot. For example, you might create a custom link on the device view which links to the current device in a network monitoring system.

Custom links can be created under the admin UI or web UI located in the navbar under Extensibility > Miscellaneous > Custom Links. Each link is associated with a particular Nautobot object type (location, device, prefix, etc.) and will be displayed on relevant views. Each link is assigned text and a URL, both of which support Jinja2 templating. The text and URL are rendered with the context variable obj representing the current object.

For example, you might define a link like this:

  • Text: View NMS
  • URL: https://nms.example.com/nodes/?name={{ obj.name }}

When viewing a device named Router4, this link would render as:

<a href="https://nms.example.com/nodes/?name=Router4">View NMS</a>

Custom links appear as buttons at the top right corner of the page. Numeric weighting can be used to influence the ordering of links.

Context Data

The following context data is available within the template when rendering a custom link's text or URL.

Variable Description
obj The Nautobot object being displayed
debug A boolean indicating whether debugging is enabled
request The current WSGI request
user The current user (if authenticated)
perms The permissions assigned to the user

All built-in Jinja2 filters are available and it's also possible to develop and register a custom Jinja2 filters.

Conditional Rendering

Only links which render with non-empty text are included on the page. You can employ conditional Jinja2 logic to control the conditions under which a link gets rendered.

For example, if you only want to display a link for active devices, you could set the link text to

{% if obj.status.name == 'Active' %}View NMS{% endif %}

The link will not appear when viewing a device with any status other than "active."

As another example, if you wanted to show only devices belonging to a certain manufacturer, you could do something like this:

{% if obj.device_type.manufacturer.name == 'Cisco' %}View NMS{% endif %}

The link will only appear when viewing a device with a manufacturer name of "Cisco."

Note

To access custom fields of an object within a template, use the cf attribute. For example, {{ obj.cf.color }} will return the value (if any) for the custom field with a key of color on obj.

Group names can be specified to organize links into groups. Links with the same group name will render as a dropdown menu beneath a single button bearing the name of the group.