Why Minipam?

Because I thought it was easy.

I already used ansible to manage my homelab which was getting more complex. I wanted a dynamic inventory to drive my ansible usage. In particular both an inventory and a source of truth for automatic DNS entries and entries on my http reverse-proxy.

I looked for a solution. I tried out https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox and https://phpipam.net/. Both were great. Netbox was too complex for me, and I couldnt get what I wanted from PHPIPAM.

So I thought to myself,

I just needed to manage, servers, network, ip-addresse, and dns. Alongside their relationships and child elements like interfaces.

"How hard can it be? it will be a weekend hackathon",

Seven months later, hundreds of hours, many of my weekends gone. I am still not finished. I regret starting it. However, I will get it a stable state where it works for me, and hand it over to the open-source community.

Vision

Something simple and usable for 95% homelabs and 70% of small businesses and offices.

This means I genuinely expect that

• 5 in every 100 homelabber will not find this project meeting their needs or expectations, and
• 30 in every 100 sys/IT/SRE admin of a small business or office, will find this subpar.

If you are in that group, please checkout netbox, its really a great tool. Minipam will never come close to the flexibility, broad-usage of Netbox.