OpenStack command line clients

Parent page: Managing your cloud resources with OpenStack

The OpenStack command line tool allows you to perform many of the actions provided by the OpenStack dashboard GUI, as well as providing some functionality which the dashboard does not. The command line client can be used from any machine, virtual or otherwise, and only requires having an internet connection and the client installed. The discussion below assumes that it is being used on a Linux machine.

Installation

The OpenStack command line tools are Python-based. You can install and run them on your personal computer or on a cloud VM. Different Linux distributions may have pre-built packages for the client, see the OpenStack installation documentation for more details. You can quickly install both Python and the OpenStack command line tools, if you have administrative privileges on your machine.

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install python python-dev python-pip
sudo pip install python-openstackclient

CentOS 7 Run as root

yum install epel-release
yum install gcc python python-dev python2-pip
pip install python-openstackclient

Fedora

sudo dnf install python-openstackclient

Note

If you do not have administrative privileges and cannot use the OS package manager, then you will need to install Python and pip by other means. Once installed, you can get the command line tools installed into your home space like so:

pip install --user python-openstackclient

The install location is probably already included in your $PATH, but you can double check whether ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile contains the following line PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin:$HOME/bin.

SDK

If you wish to explore the OpenStack API for Python, add export PYTHONPATH=${HOME}/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/:${PYTHONPATH} to your .bashrc file. Adjust the python2.7 phrase to match the Python version you have installed.

Connecting CLI to OpenStack

Your command line client must now be told how to find your OpenStack project on our clouds. The most convenient way to do this is to download an OpenStack environment setup file. On the OpenStack dashboard go to Project-> API Access-> Download OpenStack RC File. If you are connecting to Arbutus (not legacy Arbutus) you will need to make some additional changes to your RC file described here: New Arbutus RC File Modifications.

Then source the file with something like

source <project name>-openrc.sh

It will ask you for your OpenStack password, which is simply your CCDB password. Test your setup by typing

openstack image list

If you switch between different RC files you should be careful of environment variables which may still be set from the previous RC file, these may cause your OpenStack client commands to fail. Either ensure that all environment variables set in the RC file are unset with unset <variable-name>, or start a fresh new session without any of the RC environment variables set.

Executing commands

The CLI tool can be used interactively by typing

openstack

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

openstack server list

When running in interactive mode a list of available commands can be seen by typing help at the OpenStack prompt. The available commands are categorized by groups; many of the most commonly used groups are listed below. A list of commands belonging to a command group can be obtained by typing help <command group>. To get help on a particular command (e.g. options and arguments of the command) one can type help <command group> <command>. Note that many commands are available only to OpenStack administrators and will return an 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.

Command groups

server command group

Command	Command	Command	Command
add security group	migrate	resume	unlock
add volume	pause	set	unpause
create	reboot	shelve	unrescue
delete	rebuild	show	unset
dump create	remove security group	ssh	unshelve
image create	remove volume	start
list	rescue	stop
lock	resize	suspend

volume command group

Command	Command
create	set
delete	show
list	unset

console command group

Command	Command
log show	url show

flavor command group

Command	Command
list	show

image command group

Command	Command
create	save
delete	set
list	show

ip command group

Command	Command
fixed add	floating list
fixed remove	floating pool list
floating add	floating remove
floating create	floating show
floating delete

keypair command group

Command	Command
create	list
delete	show

network command group

Command	Command
create	set
delete	show
list

snapshot command group

Command	Command
create	set
delete	show
list	unset

security group command group

Command	Command
create	rule list
delete	rule show
list	set
rule create	show
rule delete

limits command group

Command
show

Separate Command-line interfaces

In addition to the openstack command described above which incorporates much of the total functionality available into one command there are also individual commands to work with the separate components of OpenStack which often have extra functionality. These separate commands are installed at the same time as the openstack command, as described above, so no further installation is required to use them. A list of the commands for working with common components of OpenStack are: * nova: for working with servers, see OpenStack docs for nova command. * glance: for working with images, see OpenStack docs for glance command. * cinder: for working with volumes, see OpenStack docs for cinder command. * heat: for working with orchestration, see OpenStack docs for heat command.