Manual installation

This page covers the basic installation of horizon in a production environment. If you are looking for a developer environment, see Quickstart.

For the system dependencies, see System Requirements.

Installation

Note

In the commands below, substitute “<release>” for your version of choice, such as “queens” or “rocky”.

If you use the development version, replace “stable/<release>” with “master”.

  1. Clone Horizon

    $ git clone https://opendev.org/openstack/horizon -b stable/<release> --depth=1
$ cd horizon

  2. Install the horizon python module into your system

    $ sudo pip install -c https://opendev.org/openstack/requirements/raw/branch/stable/<release>/upper-constraints.txt .

Configuration

This section contains a small summary of the critical settings required to run horizon. For more details, please refer to Settings Reference.

Settings

Create openstack_dashboard/local/local_settings.py. It is usually a good idea to copy openstack_dashboard/local/local_settings.py.example and edit it. As a minimum, the follow settings will need to be modified:

DEBUG

Set to False

ALLOWED_HOSTS

Set to your domain name(s)

OPENSTACK_HOST

Set to the IP of your Keystone endpoint. You may also need to alter OPENSTACK_KEYSTONE_URL

Note

The following steps in the “Configuration” section are optional, but highly recommended in production.

Translations

Compile translation message catalogs for internationalization. This step is not required if you do not need to support languages other than US English. GNU gettext tool is required to compile message catalogs.

$ sudo apt install gettext
$ ./manage.py compilemessages

Static Assets

Compress your static files by adding COMPRESS_OFFLINE = True to your local_settings.py, then run the following commands

$ ./manage.py collectstatic
$ ./manage.py compress

Logging

Horizons uses Django’s logging configuration mechanism, which can be customized by altering the LOGGING dictionary in local_settings.py. By default, Horizon’s logging example sets the log level to INFO.

Horizon also uses a number of 3rd-party clients which log separately. The log level for these can still be controlled through Horizon’s LOGGING config, however behaviors may vary beyond Horizon’s control.

For more information regarding configuring logging in Horizon, please read the Django logging directive and the Python logging directive documentation. Horizon is built on Python and Django.

Session Storage

Horizon uses Django’s sessions framework for handling session data. There are numerous session backends available, which are selected through the SESSION_ENGINE setting in your local_settings.py file.

Memcached

SESSION_ENGINE = 'django.contrib.sessions.backends.cache'
CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache',
        'LOCATION': 'controller:11211',
    }
}

External caching using an application such as memcached offers persistence and shared storage, and can be very useful for small-scale deployment and/or development. However, for distributed and high-availability scenarios memcached has inherent problems which are beyond the scope of this documentation.

Requirements:

  • Memcached service running and accessible

  • Python memcached module installed

Database

SESSION_ENGINE = 'django.core.cache.backends.db.DatabaseCache'
DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        # Database configuration here
    }
}

Database-backed sessions are scalable (using an appropriate database strategy), persistent, and can be made high-concurrency and highly-available.

The downside to this approach is that database-backed sessions are one of the slower session storages, and incur a high overhead under heavy usage. Proper configuration of your database deployment can also be a substantial undertaking and is far beyond the scope of this documentation.

Cached Database

To mitigate the performance issues of database queries, you can also consider using Django’s cached_db session backend which utilizes both your database and caching infrastructure to perform write-through caching and efficient retrieval. You can enable this hybrid setting by configuring both your database and cache as discussed above and then using

SESSION_ENGINE = "django.contrib.sessions.backends.cached_db"

Deployment

  1. Set up a web server with WSGI support. For example, install Apache web server on Ubuntu

    $ sudo apt install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi

    You can either use the provided openstack_dashboard/wsgi.py or generate a openstack_dashboard/horizon_wsgi.py file with the following command (which detects if you use a virtual environment or not to automatically build an adapted WSGI file)

    $ ./manage.py make_web_conf --wsgi

    Then configure the web server to host OpenStack dashboard via WSGI. For apache2 web server, you may need to create /etc/apache2/sites-available/horizon.conf. The template in DevStack is a good example of the file. https://opendev.org/openstack/devstack/src/branch/master/files/apache-horizon.template. Or you can automatically generate an apache configuration file. If you previously generated an openstack_dashboard/horizon_wsgi.py file it will use that, otherwise will default to using openstack_dashboard/wsgi.py

    $ ./manage.py make_web_conf --apache > /etc/apache2/sites-available/horizon.conf

    Same as above but if you want SSL support

    $ ./manage.py make_web_conf --apache --ssl --sslkey=/path/to/ssl/key --sslcert=/path/to/ssl/cert > /etc/apache2/sites-available/horizon.conf

    By default the apache configuration will launch a number of apache processes equal to the number of CPUs + 1 of the machine on which you launch the make_web_conf command. If the target machine is not the same or if you want to specify the number of processes, add the --processes option

    $ ./manage.py make_web_conf --apache --processes 10 > /etc/apache2/sites-available/horizon.conf

  2. Enable the above configuration and restart the web server

    $ sudo a2ensite horizon
$ sudo service apache2 restart

Next Steps