Platform Extensibility

[mrjk]

Hi there,

I'm quite new user of Netmiko and I greatly appreciate its capabilities. However, I've encountered challenges when trying to extend it with custom platforms that aren't included in the standard distribution (aka, I need some specific features to support OpenWRT and support some of its specialties, why leveraging Netmiko ecosystem).

Currently, adding support for non-standard devices requires working outside the documented approaches, which can be challenging for projects that depend on Netmiko as a dependency. This limitation becomes particularly apparent when using third-party components or libraries that build upon Netmiko's functionality, where it's even harder to inject your custom platform.
Would it be possible to consider adding a mechanism that allows users to load or register custom platform drivers without modifying Netmiko's core codebase, or getting away from user documentation ? Perhaps through a plugin system or extension points that would allow for:

• Extending existing platform classes more easily
• Loading custom platform definitions from external packages

This enhancement would be tremendously valuable for the ecosystem around Netmiko, enabling better integration with specialized equipment while maintaining the stability of the core library.
I'd be happy to discuss this further or even contribute to implementation efforts if this aligns with the project's roadmap.

I've seen some issues in GH about this topic, and quite often the solution was not easy or obvious. Thus I also note that there are finally quite few requests around this topic, so I may also consider I may have missed something.

Thank you for considering this suggestion!

[ktbyers]

@mrjk Yeah, I am open to doing this. Let's use this thread as a discussion for how to implement it.

At a minimum the solution should be usable with Nornir and ntc-ansible (or some custom Ansible module that uses ConnectHandler). Realistically the fix in Netmiko should not require any changes to the other libraries (nornir_netmiko, ntc-ansible, etc).