OpenStack Command Line
openstack [<global-options>] <command> [<command-arguments>]
openstack help <command>
openstack –help
openstack provides a common command-line interface to OpenStack APIs. It is generally equivalent to the CLIs provided by the OpenStack project client libraries, but with a distinct and consistent command structure.
openstack uses a similar authentication scheme as the OpenStack project CLIs, with the credential information supplied either as environment variables or as options on the command line. The primary difference is the use of ‘project’ in the name of the options OS_PROJECT_NAME/OS_PROJECT_ID over the old tenant-based names.
export OS_AUTH_URL=<url-to-openstack-identity>
export OS_PROJECT_NAME=<project-name>
export OS_USERNAME=<user-name>
export OS_PASSWORD=<password> # (optional)
openstack can use different types of authentication plugins provided by the keystoneclient library. The following default plugins are available:
Refer to the keystoneclient library documentation for more details about these plugins and their options, and for a complete list of available plugins. Please bear in mind that some plugins might not support all of the functionalities of openstack; for example the v3unscopedsaml plugin can deliver only unscoped tokens, some commands might not be available through this authentication method.
Additionally, it is possible to use Keystone’s service token to authenticate, by setting the options --os-token and --os-url (or the environment variables OS_TOKEN and OS_URL respectively). This method takes precedence over authentication plugins.
Note
To use the v3unscopedsaml method, the lxml package will need to be installed.
openstack takes global options that control overall behaviour and command-specific options that control the command operation. Most global options have a corresponding environment variable that may also be used to set the value. If both are present, the command-line option takes priority. The environment variable names are derived from the option name by dropping the leading dashes (‘–’), converting each embedded dash (‘-‘) to an underscore (‘_’), and converting to upper case.
openstack recognizes the following global options:
| option: | –profile <hmac-key> HMAC key to use for encrypting context data for performance profiling of requested operation. This key should be the value of one of the HMAC keys defined in the configuration files of OpenStack services, user would like to trace through. |
|---|
To get a list of the available commands:
openstack --help
To get a description of a specific command:
openstack help <command>
Note that the set of commands shown will vary depending on the API versions that are in effect at that time. For example, to force the display of the Identity v3 commands:
openstack –os-identity-api-version 3 –help
Additional information on the OpenStackClient command structure and arguments is available in the OpenStackClient Commands wiki page.
The list of command objects is growing longer with the addition of OpenStack project support. The object names may consist of multiple words to compose a unique name. Occasionally when multiple APIs have a common name with common overlapping purposes there will be options to select which object to use, or the API resources will be merged, as in the quota object that has options referring to both Compute and Block Storage quotas.
The actions used by OpenStackClient are defined with specific meaning to provide a consistent behavior for each object. Some actions have logical opposite actions, and those pairs will always match for any object that uses them.
Working with multiple clouds can be simplified by keeping the configuration information for those clouds in a local file. openstack supports using a clouds.yaml configuration file.
openstack will look for a file called clouds.yaml in the following locations:
The first file found wins.
The keys match the openstack global options but without the --os- prefix:
clouds:
devstack:
auth:
auth_url: http://192.168.122.10:35357/
project_name: demo
username: demo
password: 0penstack
region_name: RegionOne
ds-admin:
auth:
auth_url: http://192.168.122.10:35357/
project_name: admin
username: admin
password: 0penstack
region_name: RegionOne
infra:
cloud: rackspace
auth:
project_id: 275610
username: openstack
password: xyzpdq!lazydog
region_name: DFW,ORD,IAD
In the above example, the auth_url for the rackspace cloud is taken from clouds-public.yaml:
public-clouds:
rackspace:
auth:
auth_url: 'https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/'
OpenStackClient uses the Keystone authentication plugins so the required auth settings are not always known until the authentication type is selected. openstack will attempt to detect a couple of common auth types based on the arguments passed in or found in the configuration file, but if those are incomplete it may be impossible to know which auth type is intended. The --os-auth-type option can always be used to force a specific type.
When --os-token and --os-url are both present the token_endpoint auth type is selected automatically. If --os-auth-url and --os-username are present password auth type is selected.
openstack can record the operation history by logging settings in configuration file. Recording the user operation, it can identify the change of the resource and it becomes useful information for troubleshooting.
See Configuration about Logging Settings for more details.
The command list displayed in help output reflects the API versions selected. For example, to see Identity v3 commands OS_IDENTITY_API_VERSION must be set to 3.
Show the detailed information for server appweb01:
openstack \
--os-project-name ExampleCo \
--os-username demo --os-password secrete \
--os-auth-url http://localhost:5000:/v2.0 \
server show appweb01
The same command if the auth environment variables (OS_AUTH_URL, OS_PROJECT_NAME, OS_USERNAME, OS_PASSWORD) are set:
openstack server show appweb01
Create a new image:
openstack image create \
--disk-format=qcow2 \
--container-format=bare \
--public \
--copy-from http://somewhere.net/foo.img \
foo
The following environment variables can be set to alter the behaviour of openstack. Most of them have corresponding command-line options that take precedence if set.
Bug reports are accepted at the python-openstackclient LaunchPad project “https://bugs.launchpad.net/python-openstackclient/+bugs”.
Please refer to the AUTHORS file distributed with OpenStackClient.
Copyright 2011-2014 OpenStack Foundation and the authors listed in the AUTHORS file.
The OpenStackClient page in the OpenStack Wiki contains further documentation.
The individual OpenStack project CLIs, the OpenStack API references.