The python-openstackclient project, by Dean Troyer and others, is a new command line tool to replace the existing command line clients (including commands such as nova, keystone, cinder, etc).

This tool solves two problems I’ve encountered in the past:

  • Command line options between different command line clients are sometimes inconsistent.

  • The output from the legacy command line tools is not designed to be machine parse-able (and yet people do it anyway).

The new openstack CLI framework is implement using the cliff module for Python, which will help enforce a consistent interface to the various subcommands (because common options can be shared, and just having everything in the same codebase will help tremendously). Cliff also provides flexible table formatters. It includes a number of useful formatters out of the box, and can be extended via setuptools entry points.

The csv formatter can be used to produce machine parse-able output from list commands. For example:

$ openstack -q endpoint list -f csv --quote none
ID,Region,Service Name,Service Type
ba686936d31846f5b226539dba285654,RegionOne,quantum,network
161684fd123740138c8806267c489766,RegionOne,cinder,volume
b2019dbef5f34d1bb809e8e399369782,RegionOne,keystone,identity
4b5dd8c6b961442ba13d6b9d317d718a,RegionOne,swift_s3,s3
ac766707ffa3437eaaeaafa3c3eace08,RegionOne,swift,object-store
e3f7bd37b51341bbaa77f81ba39a3bf2,RegionOne,glance,image
6821fad71a914636af6e98775e52e1ec,RegionOne,nova_ec2,ec2
3b2a90e9f85a468988af763c707961d7,RegionOne,nova,compute

For “show” commands, the shell formatter produces output in name=value format, like this:

$ openstack -q endpoint show image -f shell --all
adminurl="http://192.168.122.110:9292"
id="e3f7bd37b51341bbaa77f81ba39a3bf2"
internalurl="http://192.168.122.110:9292"
publicurl="http://192.168.122.110:9292"
region="RegionOne"
service_id="14a1479f77274dd485e9fb52af2e1721"
service_name="glance"
service_type="image"

This output could easily be sourced into a shell script.