nautobot-ssot-fortinet 2026.5.18.10

Nautobot SSoT integration for Fortinet (FortiGate firewall + FortiAP wireless, bidirectional sync).

nautobot-ssot-fortinet

Bidirectional Nautobot ↔ FortiGate sync for firewall, wireless, and live runtime state — built on the Nautobot SSoT framework.

What this does

Four Nautobot Jobs, each handling one direction of the FortiGate↔Nautobot relationship:

#	Job	Direction	Object kinds
1	FortiGate → Nautobot (firewall)	Pull	Addresses, address groups, services, service groups, policies + rules, NAT (VIPs)
2	FortiGate → Nautobot (wireless)	Pull	WirelessNetworks (SSIDs), RadioProfiles (radios), optional AP Devices
3	FortiGate Live Status	Observability	Real-time wifi clients, DHCP leases, ARP table — joined by MAC
4	Nautobot → FortiGate (firewall)	Push	Address objects (all 4 types), address groups, services, service groups

All Jobs are idempotent (re-running produces zero diffs when nothing changed) and additive-only by default (destructive deletes opt-in via a per-Job BooleanVar).

How it works

                    ┌────────────┐
                    │  Nautobot  │
                    │            │
                    └─────┬──────┘
                       ↑  │
              pull (2) │  ▼ push (1)
                       │
                    ┌────────────┐    monitor/* (live state)
                    │  FortiGate │ ────────────────────────→ Job 3
                    └────────────┘

• Pull Jobs read cmdb/* endpoints and write to Nautobot ORM (firewall-models + core wireless). State on the FortiGate is the source of truth; Nautobot mirrors it.
• Push Job reads from Nautobot ORM and writes to FortiGate cmdb/* endpoints. Operators edit firewall objects in Nautobot's UI; the push Job propagates them to the device.
• Live status Job queries monitor/* endpoints for real-time observed state (connected clients, leases, ARP) and renders them in the Job result page + downloadable JSON snapshot.

Quick start

# 1. Bring up the dev stack
cp development/.env.example development/.env
# edit development/.env — set NAUTOBOT_SECRET_KEY + FortiGate credentials
make -C development up

# 2. Wait ~60s, then seed the ExternalIntegration + SecretsGroup
make -C development seed

# 3. Open https://ssot-fortinet-dev.local/ , enable the 4 Jobs in
#    /extras/jobs/ , then run them from /plugins/ssot/

For full installation steps including production deployment, see docs/admin/install.md.

Live-validated against real hardware

This integration was validated end-to-end against a FortiWiFi-61E during development. The live e2e harness (make e2e-live-firewall and make e2e-live-wireless) connects to a real FortiGate, syncs all object kinds, and asserts the second run produces zero diffs (full idempotency).

Real-world quirks discovered & handled:

FortiOS reality	Translation
interface-subnet address type	Treated as ipmask (FortiOS already resolves to CIDR)
Space-separated multi-port ("88 464" Kerberos)	Normalized to comma ("88,464") for firewall-models' validator
ICMP6 protocol	Mapped to IPv6-ICMP (IANA name used by firewall-models)
'513:512-1023' src-port qualifier (RLOGIN/RSH)	Source-port stripped, destination kept
protocol: "ALL" pseudo-protocol (webproxy)	Skipped — no Nautobot equivalent
protocol: "IP" + protocol-number: N	Mapped to named IANA protocol (e.g. 89 → OSPFIGP)
FortiOS WTP-profile mode vs Nautobot WirelessNetwork mode	Most-common platform-mode per VAP wins
FortiOS radio band strings (802.11ax-5G)	Pattern-matched to 2.4GHz/5GHz/6GHz enum
FortiOS VAP security: "wep128"	Lossy mapping → Open with annotation in description

See docs/user/external_interactions.md for the complete field-by-field reference.

What's required

• Nautobot 3.1+ (for the wireless models)
• nautobot-ssot 4.2+ (SSoT framework)
• nautobot-firewall-models 3.0+ (firewall object target)
• fortigate-api 2.0+ (REST client; verified against FortiOS 6.4–7.x)
• Python 3.10–3.13

See docs/admin/compatibility_matrix.md for the detailed compatibility matrix and version pinning rationale.

What's not in scope (yet)

• Policy/NAT push — pull works; push for those is a future iteration (the M2M dependency graph is more complex than addresses/services)
• Source NAT (FortiOS ippool) — pull only does Destination NAT (VIPs)
• IPv6 addresses (firewall/address6) — IPv4 only for v1
• Multi-VDOM aware UI — Jobs scope by VDOM, but the per-VDOM dropdown in the SSoT dashboard is a Nautobot-side enhancement, not in this app

Project layout

src/nautobot_ssot_fortinet/
├── clients/fortigate.py        ExternalIntegration → FortiGateAPI factory
├── diffsync/
│   ├── models/
│   │   ├── firewall.py         Vendor-neutral DiffSync models
│   │   ├── wireless.py         Vendor-neutral DiffSync models
│   │   ├── nautobot_firewall.py     Nautobot-side CRUD (pull target)
│   │   ├── nautobot_wireless.py     Nautobot-side CRUD (pull target)
│   │   └── fortigate_target_firewall.py   FortiGate-side CRUD (push target)
│   └── adapters/
│       ├── fortigate_firewall.py       Pull source
│       ├── fortigate_wireless.py       Pull source
│       ├── fortigate_firewall_target.py    Push target (read state + write CRUD)
│       ├── nautobot_firewall.py        Pull target (= push source)
│       └── nautobot_wireless.py        Pull target
├── jobs.py                     4 Job classes
└── utils/fortios.py            Translation helpers (subnet→CIDR, security→auth, etc.)

Testing

$ pytest -q
174 passed in 0.57s

Unit tests use a MagicMock-stubbed Django (per tests/conftest.py) so they run in milliseconds without bootstrapping Nautobot. Integration coverage is provided by the live e2e harnesses in development/scripts/ — those require a real FortiGate.

Status

v0.x — bidirectional sync working against real hardware. Ready for controlled production use against a single FortiGate; multi-device deployments should validate carefully (the name-mangling convention handles cross-device uniqueness, but multi-VDOM hostnames with __ characters need attention).

Roadmap: see CHANGELOG.md.

License

Apache-2.0.

Author

Ryan Malloy — [e-mail]