Development Guidelines

Coding Guidelines

For all the Python code in Sahara we have a rule - it should pass PEP 8. All Bash code should pass bashate.

To check your code against PEP 8 and bashate run:

$ tox -e pep8

Note

For more details on coding guidelines see file HACKING.rst in the root of Sahara repo.

Static analysis

The static analysis checks are optional in Sahara. but they are still very useful. The gate job will inform you if the number of static analysis warnings has increased after your change. We recommend to always check the static warnings.

To run the check commit yor change first and execute the following command:

$ tox -e pylint

Modification of Upstream Files

We never modify upstream files in Sahara. Any changes in upstream files should be made in the upstream project and then merged back in to Sahara. This includes whitespace changes, comments, and typos. Any change requests containing upstream file modifications are almost certain to receive lots of negative reviews. Be warned.

Examples of upstream files are default xml configuration files used to configure Hadoop, or code imported from the OpenStack Oslo project. The xml files will usually be found in resource directories with an accompanying README file that identifies where the files came from. For example:

$ pwd
/home/me/sahara/sahara/plugins/vanilla/v2_7_1/resources

$ ls
core-default.xml     hdfs-default.xml    oozie-default.xml   README.rst
create_oozie_db.sql  mapred-default.xml  post_conf.template  yarn-default.xml

Testing Guidelines

Sahara has a suite of tests that are run on all submitted code, and it is recommended that developers execute the tests themselves to catch regressions early. Developers are also expected to keep the test suite up-to-date with any submitted code changes.

Unit tests are located at sahara/tests/unit.

Sahara’s suite of unit tests can be executed in an isolated environment with Tox. To execute the unit tests run the following from the root of Sahara repo:

$ tox -e py27

Documentation Guidelines

All Sahara docs are written using Sphinx / RST and located in the main repo in the doc directory. You can add or edit pages here to update the http://docs.openstack.org/developer/sahara site.

The documentation in docstrings should follow the PEP 257 conventions (as mentioned in the PEP 8 guidelines).

More specifically:

1. Triple quotes should be used for all docstrings.
2. If the docstring is simple and fits on one line, then just use one line.
3. For docstrings that take multiple lines, there should be a newline after the opening quotes, and before the closing quotes.
4. Sphinx is used to build documentation, so use the restructured text markup to designate parameters, return values, etc.

Run the following command to build docs locally.

$ tox -e docs

After it you can access generated docs in doc/build/ directory, for example, main page - doc/build/html/index.html.

To make the doc generation process faster you can use:

$ SPHINX_DEBUG=1 tox -e docs

To avoid sahara reinstallation to virtual env each time you want to rebuild docs you can use the following command (it can be executed only after running tox -e docs first time):

$ SPHINX_DEBUG=1 .tox/docs/bin/python setup.py build_sphinx

Note

For more details on documentation guidelines see HACKING.rst in the root of the Sahara repo.

Event log Guidelines

Currently Sahara keeps useful information about provisioning for each cluster. Cluster provisioning can be represented as a linear series of provisioning steps, which are executed one after another. Each step may consist of several events. The number of events depends on the step and the number of instances in the cluster. Also each event can contain information about its cluster, instance, and node group. In case of errors, events contain useful information for identifying the error. Additionally, each exception in sahara contains a unique identifier that allows the user to find extra information about that error in the sahara logs. You can see an example of provisioning progress information here: http://developer.openstack.org/api-ref/data-processing/#event-log

This means that if you add some important phase for cluster provisioning to the sahara code, it’s recommended to add a new provisioning step for this phase. This will allow users to use event log for handling errors during this phase.

Sahara already has special utils for operating provisioning steps and events in the module sahara/utils/cluster_progress_ops.py.

Note

It’s strictly recommended not to use conductor event log ops directly to assign events and operate provisioning steps.

Note

You should not start a new provisioning step until the previous step has successfully completed.

Note

It’s strictly recommended to use event_wrapper for event handling.

OpenStack client usage guidelines

The sahara project uses several OpenStack clients internally. These clients are all wrapped by utility functions which make using them more convenient. When developing sahara, if you need to use an OpenStack client you should check the sahara.utils.openstack package for the appropriate one.

When developing new OpenStack client interactions in sahara, it is important to understand the sahara.service.sessions package and the usage of the keystone Session and auth plugin objects (for example, Token and Password). Sahara is migrating all clients to use this authentication methodology, where available. For more information on using sessions with keystone, please see http://docs.openstack.org/developer/keystoneauth/using-sessions.html

Storing sensitive information

During the course of development, there is often cause to store sensitive information (for example, login credentials) in the records for a cluster, job, or some other record. Storing secret information this way is not safe. To mitigate the risk of storing this information, sahara provides access to the OpenStack Key Manager service (implemented by the barbican project) through the castellan library.

To utilize the external key manager, the functions in sahara.service.castellan.utils are provided as wrappers around the castellan library. These functions allow a developer to store, retrieve, and delete secrets from the manager. Secrets that are managed through the key manager have an identifier associated with them. These identifiers are considered safe to store in the database.

The following are some examples of working with secrets in the sahara codebase. These examples are considered basic, any developer wishing to learn more about the advanced features of storing secrets should look to the code and docstrings contained in the sahara.service.castellan module.

Storing a secret

from sahara.service.castellan import utils as key_manager

password = 'SooperSecretPassword'
identifier = key_manager.store_secret(password)

Retrieving a secret

from sahara.service.castellan import utils as key_manager

password = key_manager.get_secret(identifier)

Deleting a secret

from sahara.service.castellan import utils as key_manager

key_manager.delete_secret(identifier)

When storing secrets through this interface it is important to remember that if an external key manager is being used, each stored secret creates an entry in an external service. When you are finished using the secret it is good practice to delete it, as not doing so may leave artifacts in those external services.

For more information on configuring sahara to use the OpenStack Key Manager service, see External key manager usage.