Welcome to Panhandler!

Panhandler is a lightweight utility used to aggregate and view or load configuration templates. The primary focus is PAN-OS devices such as the NGFW or Panorama yet may be extended to other elements such as Terraform and 3rd party devices.

Using predefined templates helps fast-track the loading of well known or recommended configurations without extensive searching and scrolling through GUI-click documentation. Each collection of configuration templates are known as skillets that are either preloaded into panhandler at runtime or can be manually added as needed.

Skillets can be based on xml, json, text or any other config type used by each device. They are grouped by output action including:

  • panos: load into a NGFW and commit
  • panorama: load into Panorama and commit
  • template: simple text render to the screen
  • terraform: deploy infra via Terraform templates
  • rest: interact with REST based APIs
  • docker: launch docker containers

To load a configuration into a device with panhandler, the user simply has to add the target information for the device to be configured, select the skillet to load, enter the form data, and submit. Panhandler then captures the form data, grabs each configuration element, and loads into the specified device.

Release History

V4.0

  • Released 9-2020

New Features:

  • Skillet Editor
    A new UI to edit all aspects of a Skillet.
  • Skillet Creation Tools
    This feature allows you to build a skillet from scratch in a number of different ways. For example, you can build a skillet from the differences between two saved configuration files.
  • Improved Terraform Support
    Terraform now uses a docker image in the backend, which allows any arbitrary terraform version to be supported. This allows the skillet builder to choose customized docker image containing any version of terraform and supporting libraries.
  • Support for SSH based git repositories
    This allows you to use private git repositories as well as push local changes back upstream.

V3.1

  • Released 3-2020

New Features:

  • Support for docker type skillets
    This brings support for Ansible, Shell scripts, custom binaries, configurable Terraform versions, and more. See github for examples.

V3.0

  • Released 2-2020

New Features:

  • New skillet type: pan_validation
    This allows PAN-OS configuration file analysis using a jinja language expressions. More example can be found on github.
  • Dynamic UI elements
    Allows variables to be shown or hidden based on the value of another variable.
  • New variable types
    File uploads, Dynamic lists, new validations and many more.

V2.2

  • Released 6-2019

New Features:

  • Improved Input validation
  • Python script support with configurable input types.
    Script arguments can be passed via cli arguments or as env variables
  • Automatic update detection.
    Panhandler will check if you are running the latest and greatest version on startup
  • PAN-OS Skillet debug support
    This allows you to verify what is going to be pushed to a PAN-OS device before actually pushing
  • Skillet debug on import
    Checks all skillets during repository import for syntax errors
  • Collections page now supports filtering and sorting

Example Skillets

Many more examples can be found on Github.