I’ve been working with OpenStack a lot recently, and I’ve ended up with a small collection of utilities that make my life easier. On the odd chance that they’ll make your life easier, too, I thought I’d hilight them here.

Crux⌗

Crux is a tool for provisioning tenants, users, and roles in keystone. Instead of a sequence of keystone command, you can provision new tenants, users, and roles with a single comand.

For example, to create user demo in the demo tenant with password secret:

# crux --user demo:demo::secret
2013-10-21 crux WARNING creating tenant demo
2013-10-21 crux WARNING creating user demo with password secret

Crux is in general idempotent; if we were to run the same command a second time we woudl see:

# crux --user demo:demo::secret
2013-10-21 crux WARNING set password for user demo to secret

Crux can also take input from a configuration file, so you can quickly set up a complex set of tenants and users.

Sqlcli⌗

Sqlcli uses SQLAlchemy to run SQL queries against a variety of backends specified by SQL connection URLs. I wrote this to perform queries and simple maintenance against the various databases used by OpenStack. For example, you can get a list of networks from the Neutron database with a command like this:

# sqlcli -f /etc/neutron/plugin.ini -i DATABASE/sql_connection \
  'select name,cidr from subnets'

And get output like this:

public,172.24.4.224/28
net0-subnet0,10.0.0.0/24

You can add the --pretty flag and get output like this:

+--------------+-----------------+
|     name     |       cidr      |
+--------------+-----------------+
|    public    | 172.24.4.224/28 |
| net0-subnet0 |   10.0.0.0/24   |
+--------------+-----------------+

openstack-service⌗

The openstack-service command is a convenience tool for managing OpenStack services. It lets you start/stop or query the status of groups of related services. For example, if you want to see the status of all your Cinder services, you can run:

# openstack-service status cinder

And get:

openstack-cinder-api (pid  11644) is running...
openstack-cinder-scheduler (pid  11790) is running...
openstack-cinder-volume (pid  11712) is running...

You can stop all Cinder and Glance services like this:

# openstack-service stop cinder glance
Stopping openstack-cinder-api: [  OK  ]
Stopping openstack-cinder-scheduler: [  OK  ]
Stopping openstack-cinder-volume: [  OK  ]
Stopping openstack-glance-api: [  OK  ]
Stopping openstack-glance-registry: [  OK  ]

And start them back up again the same way:

# openstack-service start cinder glance
Starting openstack-cinder-api: [  OK  ]
Starting openstack-cinder-scheduler: [  OK  ]
Starting openstack-cinder-volume: [  OK  ]
Starting openstack-glance-api: [  OK  ]
Starting openstack-glance-registry: [  OK  ]

Without any additional arguments openstack-service stop will stop all OpenStack services on the current host.