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Connecting to NetBox

This page covers establishing a connection to NetBox. For installation, see Installation. For deeper authentication topics including v2 tokens and token rotation, see Authentication.

Basic connection

# Import the module
Import-Module PowerNetbox

# Create a credential - use 'api' as the username (NetBox convention)
# and paste your API token as the password
$cred = Get-Credential -UserName 'api' -Message 'Enter your NetBox API token'

# Connect
Connect-NBAPI -Hostname 'netbox.example.com' -Credential $cred

The username is the literal string 'api'. NetBox ignores it; only the token in the password field matters.

Connection with self-signed certificate

For internal NetBox instances with self-signed TLS certificates:

Connect-NBAPI -Hostname 'netbox.local' -Credential $cred -SkipCertificateCheck

Warning

-SkipCertificateCheck disables certificate validation for the entire PowerShell session. Use only for trusted internal instances.

Verify connection

Get-NBVersion
# Returns: netbox-version, python-version, etc.

Performance

See Performance Optimization for tips on reducing response size and speeding up large queries.

Next steps