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Configure API-Access

Goal

  • Authenticating to use the OpenStack Cloud API
  • Starting a sample stack using the OpenStack Cloud API

Prerequisites

  • You need to have the login data for the OpenStack Cloud API (username and passphrase).
  • The OpenStack CLI-Tools called in an up-to-date version.
  • Knowledge how to use a terminal/SSH and SSH-keys

Accessing the OpenStack Cloud API

To work with the OpenStack Cloud API you need to set environment variables used by the command-line tools to authenticate and authorize your API calls. Users logged into the Horizon Dashboard can download a file that helps setting these variables under API Access. There you can click on Download OpenStack RC File → OpenStack RC File to download the corresponding file.

horizon-compute-apiaccess-openrc

Setting up the environment variables

To provide the clients with the parameters for authentication and authorization use (Username/Password/Project-Scope) for the corresponding session we have to source the downloaded file and type our OpenStack password:

source Downloads/sys11demo-openrc.sh

source openrc

Sourcing this file to set up environment variables does not return output.

Test API Access

We can now use the OpenStack command line client to check whether our access works:

syseleven:~ syseleven$ openstack network list
+--------------------------------------+---------+--------------------------------------+
| ID                                   | Name    | Subnets                              |
+--------------------------------------+---------+--------------------------------------+
| caf8de33-1059-4473-a2c1-2a62d12294fa | ext-net | 51a64106-3eb2-4172-9343-404a9f6b9993 |
+--------------------------------------+---------+--------------------------------------+

In this example you see a network pool which provides us with Floating IP addresses. This shows that you successfully used the OpenStack Cloud API.

Using infrastructure templates

Now you can use the OpenStack command-line tools to control all the infrastructure components of the OpenStack Cloud (that is, networks, security groups, virtual machines). To automate this, you can use Heat templates which are a structured representation of your setups. We provide examples that work with the OpenStack Cloud on GitHub. Feel free to check them out!

Example setups can be copied as follows:

git clone https://github.com/syseleven/heat-examples.git

Now you can take the LAMP-Setup from our single LAMP Server example and start it using the API this time:

cd heat-examples/lamp-server
openstack stack create -t example.yaml --parameter key_name=sys11demokey lampstack