MikroTik RouterOS v7.1 launches stable with REST!

Hey guys,

There’s crazy awesome news about MikroTik this week – the (years) long awaited release of RouterOS [ROS] version 7 is finally here! ROSv7.1 just hit the “stable” channel of MikroTik firmware after about 7 years of talking about its release on the forums.

While there’s a ton of good stuff in v7, I want to talk today about the now officially supported MikroTik REST API. In the past, writing software for MikroTik automation and orchestration required you to learn a slightly new and different syntax, write software to talk to the ROS system API, write more code to do a bunch of parsing (or use a class) to understand the raw results, and then finally do something with the data returned. 

Now, this effort is significantly enhanced and streamlined with the REST API. No need to parse raw API output or use a class – you can get straight to work doing something with the data that’s returned. And those results are presented as standard JSON encoded data, so front-end developers will love that they don’t have to encapsulate the data after getting it from the router.

Basically, using the REST API on the MikroTik removes the need for a translation between ROS API and the server, and it also removes the need to format the results so that they can be standardized on the front end – it’s a double whammy!

RemoteWinBox has been using the PHP RouterOS API class to do some of the translation work for us for years. Stay tuned as we test the performance of PHP API against REST API and report the results!