Welcome to the OpenStack SDK!

This documentation is split into three sections:

  • an installation guide

  • a section for users looking to build applications which make use of OpenStack

  • a section for those looking to contribute to this project

Installation

openstacksdk

openstacksdk is a client library for building applications to work with OpenStack clouds. The project aims to provide a consistent and complete set of interactions with OpenStack’s many services, along with complete documentation, examples, and tools.

It also contains an abstraction interface layer. Clouds can do many things, but there are probably only about 10 of them that most people care about with any regularity. If you want to do complicated things, the per-service oriented portions of the SDK are for you. However, if what you want is to be able to write an application that talks to clouds no matter what crazy choices the deployer has made in an attempt to be more hipster than their self-entitled narcissist peers, then the Cloud Abstraction layer is for you.

More information about its history can be found at https://docs.openstack.org/openstacksdk/latest/contributor/history.html

openstack

List servers using objects configured with the clouds.yaml file:

import openstack

# Initialize and turn on debug logging
openstack.enable_logging(debug=True)

# Initialize cloud
conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mordred')

for server in conn.compute.servers():
    print(server.to_dict())

Cloud Layer

openstacksdk contains a higher-level layer based on logical operations.

import openstack

# Initialize and turn on debug logging
openstack.enable_logging(debug=True)

for server in conn.list_servers():
    print(server.to_dict())

The benefit is mostly seen in more complicated operations that take multiple steps and where the steps vary across providers:

import openstack

# Initialize and turn on debug logging
openstack.enable_logging(debug=True)

# Initialize connection
# Cloud configs are read with openstack.config
conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mordred')

# Upload an image to the cloud
image = conn.create_image(
    'ubuntu-trusty', filename='ubuntu-trusty.qcow2', wait=True)

# Find a flavor with at least 512M of RAM
flavor = conn.get_flavor_by_ram(512)

# Boot a server, wait for it to boot, and then do whatever is needed
# to get a public ip for it.
conn.create_server(
    'my-server', image=image, flavor=flavor, wait=True, auto_ip=True)

openstack.config

openstack.config will find cloud configuration for as few as 1 clouds and as many as you want to put in a config file. It will read environment variables and config files, and it also contains some vendor specific default values so that you don’t have to know extra info to use OpenStack

  • If you have a config file, you will get the clouds listed in it

  • If you have environment variables, you will get a cloud named envvars

  • If you have neither, you will get a cloud named defaults with base defaults

Sometimes an example is nice.

Create a clouds.yaml file:

clouds:
 mordred:
   region_name: Dallas
   auth:
     username: 'mordred'
     password: XXXXXXX
     project_name: 'shade'
     auth_url: 'https://identity.example.com'

Please note: openstack.config will look for a file called clouds.yaml in the following locations:

  • Current Directory

  • ~/.config/openstack

  • /etc/openstack

More information at https://docs.openstack.org/openstacksdk/latest/user/config/configuration.html