Setup OpenStack client

The OpenStack client software is a crucial tool for interacting with OpenStack services. In certain OpenStack-Helm deployment scripts, the OpenStack client software is utilized to conduct essential checks during deployment. Therefore, installing the OpenStack client on the developer’s machine is a vital step.

The script setup-client.sh can be used to setup the OpenStack client.

cd ~/osh/openstack-helm
./tools/deployment/common/setup-client.sh

Please keep in mind that the above script configures OpenStack client so it uses internal Kubernetes FQDNs like keystone.openstack.svc.cluster.local. In order to be able to resolve these internal names you have to configure the Kubernetes authoritative DNS server (CoreDNS) to work as a recursive resolver and then add its IP (10.96.0.10 by default) to /etc/resolv.conf. This is only going to work when you try to access to OpenStack services from one of Kubernetes nodes because IPs from the Kubernetes service network are routed only between Kubernetes nodes.

If you wish to access OpenStack services from outside the Kubernetes cluster, you need to expose the OpenStack Ingress controller using an IP address accessible from outside the Kubernetes cluster, typically achieved through solutions like MetalLB or similar tools. In this scenario, you should also ensure that you have set up proper FQDN resolution to map to the external IP address and create the necessary Ingress objects for the associated FQDN.

It is also important to note that the above script does not actually installs the Openstack client package on the host but instead it creates a bash script /usr/local/bin/openstack that runs the Openstack client in a Docker container. If you need to pass extra command line parameters to the docker run command use the environment variable OPENSTACK_CLIENT_CONTAINER_EXTRA_ARGS. For example if you need to mount a directory from the host file system, you can do the following

export OPENSTACK_CLIENT_CONTAINER_EXTRA_ARGS="-v /data:/data"
/usr/local/bin/openstack <subcommand> <options>

Remember that the container file system is ephemeral and is destroyed when you stop the container. So if you would like to use the Openstack client capabilities interfacing with the file system then you have to mount a directory from the host file system where you will read/write necessary files. For example, this is useful when you create a key pair and save the private key in a file which is then used for ssh access to VMs. Or it could be Heat recipes which you prepare in advance and then use with Openstack client.