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Demo Profile

The demo profile lets you run every nbx command against the public demo.netbox.dev instance — no personal NetBox server required.

Setup with Playwright

nbx demo init uses Playwright to open a headless Chromium browser, log in to demo.netbox.dev, create a fresh API token, and store it automatically:

nbx demo init
# prompts for demo.netbox.dev username and password

For CI or scripted use, pass credentials as flags:

nbx demo init --username nbxuser --password mypassword --headless

When you initialize the demo profile this way, nbx also stores the demo username and password in the same private config file so it can automatically refresh the demo token later if demo.netbox.dev resets and starts returning Invalid v1 token.

Options for nbx demo init

Flag Description
--username / -u demo.netbox.dev username (prompted if omitted)
--password / -p demo.netbox.dev password (prompted if omitted)
--headless / --headed Run Playwright headless (default) or with a visible browser window
--token-key Skip Playwright — set token directly
--token-secret Skip Playwright — set token directly

Playwright installation

Install Playwright and the Chromium browser before running nbx demo init:

uv tool run --from playwright playwright install chromium --with-deps

Direct token setup

If you already have a demo API token, skip Playwright entirely:

# v2 token (key + secret)
nbx demo init --token-key <key> --token-secret <secret>

# v1 token (single string) — set token_version manually in config.json
nbx demo --token-key "" --token-secret <40-char-token>

Verify the demo config

nbx demo config
nbx demo config --show-token   # reveal token values

The config output also shows whether demo login credentials are available for automatic token refresh.

Running commands against demo

The nbx demo subcommand tree mirrors the full nbx tree, using the demo profile's token and https://demo.netbox.dev as the base URL:

nbx demo dcim devices list
nbx demo ipam prefixes list -q status=active
nbx demo dcim sites list --json
nbx demo dcim interfaces get --id 4 --trace
nbx demo call GET /api/status/
nbx demo dev tui

If the saved demo token has expired because the public demo instance reset overnight, nbx will automatically try to provision a fresh demo token using the saved demo username and password before surfacing the auth failure to you.

Demo TUI

nbx demo tui
nbx demo tui --theme dracula

Launches the Textual TUI pre-connected to the demo instance.

Demo Dev TUI

nbx demo dev tui
nbx demo dev tui --theme dracula

Launches the developer request workbench pre-connected to the demo instance, so you can inspect paths and execute requests against demo.netbox.dev without switching profiles.

Reset

Remove saved demo credentials:

nbx demo reset

How the demo profile is stored

The demo profile is stored alongside the default profile in ~/.config/netbox-cli/config.json:

{
  "profiles": {
    "default": { "...": "..." },
    "demo": {
      "base_url": "https://demo.netbox.dev",
      "token_version": "v1",
      "token_key": null,
      "token_secret": "40-character-token-here",
      "demo_username": "nbxuser",
      "demo_password": "mypassword",
      "timeout": 30.0
    }
  }
}

The base_url for the demo profile is always hardcoded to https://demo.netbox.dev regardless of what is stored in the config file. The config file is written with private user-only permissions so the stored demo credentials stay local to your machine.