Installing Horizon

This page covers the basic installation of horizon, the OpenStack dashboard.

System Requirements

  • Python 2.7
  • Django 1.7 or 1.8
  • Minimum required set of running OpenStack services are:
    • nova: OpenStack Compute
    • keystone: OpenStack Identity
    • glance: OpenStack Image service
    • neutron: OpenStack Networking (unless nova-network is used)
  • All other services are optional. Horizon supports the following services in the Juno release. If the keystone endpoint for a service is configured, horizon detects it and enables its support automatically.
    • swift: OpenStack Object Storage
    • cinder: OpenStack Block Storage
    • heat: Orchestration
    • ceilometer: Telemetry
    • trove: Database service for OpenStack
    • sahara: Data processing service for OpenStack

Installation

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

    $ sudo apt-get install gettext
$ tox -e manage -- compilemessages

    This command compiles translation message catalogs within Python virtualenv named .venv. After this step, you can remove .venv directory safely.

  2. Install the horizon python module into your system. Run the following in the top directory:

    $ sudo pip install -c http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/requirements/plain/upper-constraints.txt?h=stable/<release> .

    Where “<release>” is the release you are installing (eg. “newton”, “ocata”, ...)

  3. 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. At least we need to customize the following variables in this file.

    • ALLOWED_HOSTS (unless DEBUG is True)
    • OPENSTACK_KEYSTONE_URL

    For more details, please refer to Deploying Horizon and Settings and Configuration.

  4. Optional: Django has a compressor feature that performs many enhancements for the delivery of static files, including standardization and minification/uglification. This processing can be run either online or offline (pre-processed). Letting the compression process occur at runtime will incur processing and memory use when the resources are first requested; doing it ahead of time removes those runtime penalties.

    If you want the static files to be processed before server runtime, you’ll need to configure your local_settings.py to specify COMPRESS_OFFLINE = True, then run the following commands:

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

  5. Set up a web server with WSGI support. It is optional but recommended in production deployments. For example, install Apache web server on Ubuntu:

    $ sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi

    You will either use the provided openstack_dashboard/wsgi/django.wsgi or generate an openstack_dashboard/wsgi/horizon.wsgi 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. http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-dev/devstack/tree/files/apache-horizon.template Or, if you previously generated an openstack_dashboard/wsgi/horizon.wsgi you can automatically generate an apache configuration file:

    $ ./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

  6. Finally, enable the above configuration and restart the web server:

    $ sudo a2ensite horizon
$ sudo service apache2 restart

Next Steps