Getting started with NetBase: your first router in 5 minutes

NetBase is a visual editor + deploy workbench for Cisco networks. Everything the UI does is grounded in real IOS config generation, so once you’ve filled in a hostname you can open the Config tab and see the lines a device will actually run. This post walks you through that first five-minute tour — no account, no connector, no CLI.

Head to console.netbaseapp.com. You don’t need to sign up to start — the editors work right away in your browser. The sidebar has Router, Switch, and VLAN editors plus a Dashboard, Fabric view, Connectors panel, and Inventory. Pick Router to start.

You’ll land on a single tab called “R1” with a default configuration seeded — hostname R1, domain network.internal, SSH v2 enabled. Everything you can see is editable.

The Basic section tab is where you set the identity of the device:

• Hostname — rename it to something meaningful. This flows into the project’s activity feed, the Dashboard, and every generated config.
• Model — pick your real platform. The model drives feature gating (e.g. some sections only show up on Layer 3 switches).
• Domain, Enable secret, Console / VTY passwords — pre-filled with sensible lab defaults. Change them to match your environment.
• Clock, CDP, LLDP, Enable SSH — the togges you’d flip under hostname, clock set, and the line blocks.

As you type, NetBase validates each field inline. Hostnames that contain spaces go red, for instance, before the router has a chance to reject them.

Click the Interface tab (or use the command palette — ⌘K → “Interfaces”). The first card is empty and invites you to fill in Port, IP address, Subnet mask, and optional description / MTU / speed / duplex etc. Under the hood this card maps one-to-one to an interface GigabitEthernet0/0 block in IOS.

When you want more interfaces, scroll down and click Add interface. For subinterfaces (dot1Q tagging) there’s an Add subinterface button inside the parent interface card.

Click Show config on any section card (or ⌘K → “Generate full config for current device”). NetBase opens a modal with the exact Cisco IOS syntax your inputs rendered into, ready to copy-paste into a device or a change ticket. Toggle “differences only” to see just the edits you’ve made vs. the previous state.

The generator is the same one the deploy path uses — the modal is a dry-run, not a separate template.

Up until this point your work lives only in this browser tab — refresh the page and it’s still there, but it isn’t backed up anywhere. To keep it safe, click Sign in in the top-right. After signing in, NetBase puts your device into a project and saves every change automatically.

From that point on, every edit is saved the moment you make it. Close the tab, log in on another machine tomorrow, everything is right where you left it. The Projects page lets you create more projects, duplicate the one you just made, or invite teammates to collaborate on it.

• Add a teammate to your project (Projects → Share). Watch the live presence chips light up as you both edit the same router at the same time.
• Open the Connectors page to add a connector. Once one is reachable, the Deploy button in the editor opens a full review modal that diffs your design against the device’s actual running-config.
• Paste an existing device’s show running-config into the Import from running-config dialog to adopt a brownfield device into the tool.

Five minutes is enough to get to “generated a config”. From there it only gets better — collaborative editing, real deploys, and per-device history all sit a few clicks away.