phpIPAM is an open-source web-based IP address management platform which simplify IP address management for network administrators in your organisation. The solution is written and maintained by Miha Petkovsek and first released in 2013, then moved in 2015 to github. It’s using MySQL database backend, using jQuery libraries, ajax and HTML5/CSS3 features. The latest version of the software 1.4.2 include lots of bugs and security fixes, in addition to few enhancements.
Features of the phpIPAM include :
- IPv4/IPv6 IP address management
- Section / Subnet management
- Automatic free space display for subnets
- Visual subnet display
- Automatic subnet scanning / IP status checks
- PowerDNS integration
- NAT support
- RACK management
- Domain authentication (AD, LDAP, Radius)
- Per-group section/subnet permissions
- Device / device types management
- RIPE subnets import
- XLS / CVS subnets import
- IP request module
- REST API
- Locations module
- VLAN management
- VRF management
- IPv4 / IPv6 calculator
- IP database search
- E-mail notifications
- Custom fields support
- Translations
- Changelogs
It come with powerful and very complete set of features to make IP management easier. Managing your network with phpIPAM will give you a great visualization of your network per rack, subnet, and per location. You can also create devices and associate resources with them.
There are many alternatives to phpIPAM, mainly Netbox to name the most popular one. Netbox is open source also written in Django framework and PostgreSQL, initially created by the network engineering team at DigitalOcean, so you should understand that it’s more complete in features especially for datacenters and more popular.
The table below is self explanatory, there are too many open issues, even pull requests are taking very long time before being closed or approved. Some of them date from 2017.
| Watch | Stars | Fork | Issues | Pull requests | |
| phpIPAM | 168 | 1.4k | 573 | 1.2k | 41 |
| Netbox | 408 | 7.7k | 1.5k | 163 | 8 |
The solution is overall great, but I think that its code is very hard to maintain, and probably it will be much easier to rewrite it using one of the popular PHP Frameworks and adding some Unit tests. Otherwise managing spaghetti code is very painful even if contributors manage to support the solution during the last years.
phpIPAM is an open source software released under GPL v3 license. More information at https://github.com/phpipam/phpipam
