OpenStackClient

osc is a CLI for the OpenStack written in Rust. It is relying on the corresponding openstack_sdk crate (library) and is generated using OpenAPI specifications. That means that the maintenance effort for the tool is much lower compared to the fully human written python-openstackclient. Due to the fact of being auto-generated there are certain differences to the python cli but also an enforced UX consistency.

NOTE: As a new tool it tries to solve some issues with the original python-openstackclient. That means that it can not provide seamless migration from one tool to another.

Commands implementation code is being produced by codegenerator what means there is no maintenance required for that code.

Microversions

Initially python-openstackclient was using lowest microversion unless additional argument specifying microversion was passed. Later, during switching commands towards using of the OpenStackSDK a highest possible microversion started being used (again unless user explicitly requested microversion with --XXX-api-version Y.Z). One common thing both approaches use is to give user control over the version what is crucial to guarantee stability. The disadvantage of both approaches is that they come with certain opinions that does not necessarily match what user expects and make expectation on what will happen hard. For the end user reading help page of the command is pretty complex and error prone when certain parameters appear, disappear and re-appear with different types between microversion. Implementing (and using) the command is also both complex and error prone in this case.

osc is trying to get the best of 2 approaches and providing dedicated commands for microversions (i.e. create20, create294). Latest microversion command is always having a general alias (create in the above case) to let user explicitly use latest microversion, what, however, does not guarantee it can be invoked with requested parameters. This approach allows user to be very explicit in the requirement and have a guarantee of the expected parameters. When a newer microversion is required user should explicitly to do "migration" step adapting the invocation to a newer set of parameters. Microversion (or functionality) deprecation is also much simpler this way and is handled by marking the whole command deprecated and/or drop it completely.

Request timing

osc supports --timing argument that enables capturing of all HTTP requests and outputs timings grouped by URL (ignoring the query parameters) and method.

Command interface

osc

OpenStack command line interface.

Configuration

As all OpenStack tools it fully supports clouds.yaml

Features

  • osc api as an API wrapper allowing user to perform any direct API call specifying service type, url, method and payload. This can be used for example when certain resource is not currently implemented natively.

  • osc auth with subcommands for dealing explicitly with authentication (showing current auth info, renewing auth, MFA/SSO support)

  • Every resource is having a service type in the command solving confusions like user groups vs volume groups

  • Every multi-word resource name is "-" separated (i.e. floating-ip, access-rule)

Output

  • osc ... -o json as an explicit machine readable format output. It allows seeing raw resource json representation as send by the API without any processing on the client side.

Note: the result is not the raw json response, but the raw json resource information found underneath expected resource key. This mode can be used i.e. to see fields that are not expected by the osc and allows further easy machine processing with tools like jq

  • osc ... -o wide for list operations to return all known fields. By default list operation will only return a subset of known generic resource fields to prevent multiline tables. This mode (together with not specifying -o parameter at all) is considered as an output for humans. Field names are not generally renamed and are names as the API returns them.

Shell autocompletion

osc supports generation of the completion file for diverse shells. This can be enabled i.e. by executing

bash echo 'source <(osc completion bash)' >>~/.bashrc

Usage: osc [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Available subcommands:

  • osc api — Perform direct REST API requests with authorization
  • osc auth — Cloud Authentication operations
  • osc block-storage — Block Storage (Volume) service (Cinder) commands
  • osc catalog — Catalog commands args
  • osc compute — Compute service (Nova) operations
  • osc dns — DNS service (Designate) operations
  • osc identity — Identity (Keystone) commands
  • osc image — Image service operations
  • osc load-balancer — Load Balancer service operations
  • osc network — Network (Neutron) commands
  • osc object-store — Object Store service (Swift) commands
  • osc placement — The placement API service was introduced in the 14.0.0 Newton release within the nova repository and extracted to the placement repository in the 19.0.0 Stein release. This is a REST API stack and data model used to track resource provider inventories and usages, along with different classes of resources. For example, a resource provider can be a compute node, a shared storage pool, or an IP allocation pool. The placement service tracks the inventory and usage of each provider. For example, an instance created on a compute node may be a consumer of resources such as RAM and CPU from a compute node resource provider, disk from an external shared storage pool resource provider and IP addresses from an external IP pool resource provider
  • osc completion — Output shell completion code for the specified shell (bash, zsh, fish, or powershell). The shell code must be evaluated to provide interactive completion of osc commands. This can be done by sourcing it from the .bash_profile

Options:

  • --os-cloud <OS_CLOUD> — Name reference to the clouds.yaml entry for the cloud configuration

  • --os-project-id <OS_PROJECT_ID> — Project ID to use instead of the one in connection profile

  • --os-project-name <OS_PROJECT_NAME> — Project Name to use instead of the one in the connection profile

  • --os-client-config-file <OS_CLIENT_CONFIG_FILE> — Custom path to the clouds.yaml config file

  • --os-client-secure-file <OS_CLIENT_SECURE_FILE> — Custom path to the secure.yaml config file

  • -o, --output <OUTPUT> — Output format

    Possible values:

    • json: Json output
    • wide: Wide (Human readable table with extra attributes). Note: this has effect only in list operations

  • -f, --fields <FIELDS> — Fields to return in the output (only in normal and wide mode)

  • -p, --pretty — Pretty print the output

  • -v, --verbose — Verbosity level. Repeat to increase level

  • --timing — Record HTTP request timings