Show HN: Configaro – A tool for creating config templates for network devices

I work for a internet/managed service provider and we generate a lot of configs. Over time we've built a variety of techniques for doing this, the most common, similar to many others, is for us to maintain "base configs" and snippets for various scenarios (statically routed, dynamically routed with failover etc etc.) and then we have internal docs with step-by-step instructions on how to create the right IPAM entries and build the final config.

This works well most of the time but every so often we might rush a config, miss a step or put the wrong value in for field - the best case is that the issue is noticed and we can fix remotely. The worst case is that the job fails. We also found that sometimes engineers would build up their own custom flavours of base configs and snippets on their own devices.

We wanted something better. We looked at using a templating language but we didn't love the work required to install the correct toolchain and after some testing, found that providing the values through the CLI to be a little restrictive and the process of building a template more daunting than we wanted.

So we built something ourselves, and we're now releasing Configaro: https://configaro.com

It's an entirely online, you build the template and specify what variables it needs and place them in the right place. Then later you input your variables and it spits out your config. There's currently one "advanced" variable: IP Address with Subnet, if you create one of these it automatically provides you some derived values such as the host address, subnet mask, mask length, wildcard address, first usable, last usable which helps remove a big source of error.

We've been using it for the last few months and it's working really well, engineers prefer using it as it's quicker and we've found it good for sharing little snippets.

I'd really love to know what you guys think about it, any ideas or feedback would be awesome!

https://configaro.com