Managing your cloud resources with OpenStack: Difference between revisions

The OpenStack CLI tools performs many of the actions performed by the OpenStack dashboard GUI but on the command line. They also allow more functionality above and beyond the OpenStack dashboard.

To begin, get the openstack environment setup file: On the OpenStack dashboard go to compute->Access & Security-> API Access-> Download OpenStack RC File. This file sets environment variables so that the command line client(s) know how to connect to your OpenStack project. Then source the file (you will need to provide your OpenStack password).

The OpenStack combined CLI replaces the various separate command line tools, such as nova, swift, glance, cider etc. (see [OpenStack#Separate Command Line Clients] for a brief overview of the older separate command line clients). See [http://docs.openstack.org/developer/python-openstackclient/ http://docs.openstack.org/developer/python-openstackclient/] for the official documentation. The rest of this section gives a very basic overview to get a user started and points out some of the commands available.

To install on a machine without admin privileges (provided pip is already installed) use:{{command| pip install --user python-openstackclient}}

which installs to ~/.local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/. By adding <code>export PYTHONPATH=${HOME}/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/:${PYTHONPATH}</code> to your <code>.bashrc</code> file if you are using Python major version X=2, and minor version Y=7, python can then load the OpenStack modules (see [] for information about working with the Python OpenStack API). Further adding <code>export PATH=${HOME}/.local/bin:${PATH}</code> to your .bashrc will allow you to run the OpenStack commands directly.

and then issuing commands at the prompt. Alternatively the commands can be issued as one-offs by preceding the command with <code>openstack</code>, for example

When running in interactive mode a list of available commands can be seen by typing <code>help</code> at the OpenStack prompt. The available commands are categorized by groups, many of the most commonly used groups are listed below (e.g. the <code>server</code> command group). A list of commands belonging to a command group can be obtained by typing <code>help <command group></code>. To get help on a particular command (e.g. options and arguments of the command) one can type <code>help <command group> <command></code>. Note that many of the available commands are available only to OpenStack administrators and will show some meaningless error message if a non-administrator tries using it. For this reason a list of available commands grouped by command groups is provided below to allow one to easily identify commands available to the average user.

===Separate Command Line Clients===

The older version of the command line clients were separated into individual clients which operated on the various aspects of OpenStack. They are mentioned here since, as of the time of writing, not all the functionality of the older separate command line clients has been incorporated into the new combined command line clients and one may find them useful in addition to the newer combined command line client.<!--

</ol>-->