Guerrilla-patching, or Monkey-patching in Anger

[sburlappp]

I've recently submitted some feature suggestions, to meet my own local needs, but had those changes rejected as not being suitable for inclusion in the main NetBox product.

Fair enough - the stern guidance of our BDFL is what has made NetBox the widely used and useful product it is today.

But, the users have their own needs, and this is open source, so we have options.

This topic is an attempt to openly discuss "worst practices" for significantly modifying NetBox's core behavior in a local installation without needing to replace core code files or fork the whole project.

These practices might include:

• Modifications to official Docker images, auto-applied from a Dockerfile, so they re-apply on every update
• Modifications to core functions or object types, applied dynamically from within the __init__ of a custom local plugin

My goal here is help provide guidance to anyone who may follow, to make simple core changes in a maintainable way, to quickly solve local problems without being overly limited by the out-of-box product.