Why MiniPAM?

Because I thought it would be easy.

I was already using Ansible to manage a homelab that kept getting more complex. I wanted a dynamic inventory to drive that work—in particular, a source of truth for automatic DNS entries and my HTTP reverse proxy.

I looked for a solution. I tried NetBox and phpIPAM. Both are great. NetBox was more complex than I needed, and I could not get exactly what I wanted from phpIPAM.

So I thought:

I only need to manage servers, networks, IP addresses, and DNS, along with their relationships and child elements such as interfaces.

How hard can it be? It will be a weekend hackathon.

Several months later—and hundreds of hours and weekends gone—I was still not finished. I regret starting it. However, I will get it to a stable state where it works for me, (and has worked for me for months), then hand it over to the open-source community. I intend to maintain it for some time before handing it over to the community.

The vision

Something simple and usable for many small businesses and most homelabs.

I genuinely expect that MiniPAM will not meet every small business or homelabber's needs, and that plenty of small-office IT, SRE, and systems administrators will find it too limited. If you are in that group, please look at NetBox. It really is a great tool.

MiniPAM will never approach NetBox's flexibility or breadth. That is not the goal. The goal is to make a modest network easier to understand without making its operator maintain an enterprise model.