banzai-plugins

Over the last four years of running OPNsense I’ve built various scripts and tools to manage and monitor my firewalls and the networks they serve. With each new release I do a clean install to avoid maintenance issues, which meant reinstalling all of these tools by hand every time.

Some of them have become essential to my workflow. The Prometheus metrics exporter, for example, feeds dpinger output into Prometheus and on to Grafana alerting, giving me visibility into my VPN overlay network so I know the moment something breaks.

This repository collects those tools and packages them as proper OPNsense plugins so they survive upgrades. Packages are signed and served from a per-release pkg repository via GitHub Pages, so installation is just a pkg install or a click in the Firmware UI.

Why a separate repo? These plugins sometimes involve a fair amount of code that would be difficult for the OPNsense team to validate and maintain, especially when adoption is likely to be limited. The OPNsense developers are focused on building a great product and shouldn’t be distracted by niche tools that serve a small audience. This is not criticism – it’s simply the reality that you can’t do it all. If a plugin here matures to the point where it belongs in the official opnsense/plugins repository, great – it will follow the standards and requirements set by the OPNsense project. Until then, contributions are welcome here.

This is as much a research project as a plugin repository. I don’t take myself too seriously here – the real goal is to learn. Building a signed pkg repo from scratch, wiring up YubiKey PIV signing, automating VM builds, writing MVC plugins for a framework I’d never touched before – every piece taught me something I didn’t know going in.

I’m an amateur Python developer – a lover of the work rather than a professional software engineer. I do have a long history with FreeBSD from my days as a sysadmin (DevOps before it had a name), when I built and ran products like imap4all.com. These plugins lean heavily on LLM-assisted development – particularly Claude Code – for the MVC boilerplate, build infrastructure, and FreeBSD packaging. The code works, but it may not always follow every OPNsense convention to the letter. Suggestions and contributions are very welcome – feel free to open an issue or pull request on GitHub.

Warning

These plugins are provided as-is. Use at your own risk.

Plugins

Plugin

Package

Description

Hello World

os-hello_world

Hello World example plugin

Kea DDNS

os-kea-ddns

Kea DHCP Dynamic DNS support

Metrics Exporter

os-metrics_exporter

Prometheus exporter for OPNsense metrics