Python bindings to the OpenStack Nova API

This is a client for the OpenStack Nova API. There's a Python API (the novaclient module), and a command-line script (nova). Each implements 100% of the OpenStack Nova API.

See the OpenStack CLI guide for information on how to use the nova command-line tool. You may also want to look at the OpenStack API documentation.

python-novaclient is licensed under the Apache License like the rest of OpenStack.

• License: Apache License, Version 2.0
• PyPi - package installation
• Online Documentation
• Blueprints - feature specifications
• Bugs - issue tracking
• Source
• Specs
• How to Contribute

Contents:

• Command-line API
• Python API
• Testing

Command-line API

Installing this package gets you a shell command, nova, that you can use to interact with any OpenStack cloud.

You'll need to provide your OpenStack username and password. You can do this with the --os-username, --os-password and --os-project-name params, but it's easier to just set them as environment variables:

export OS_USERNAME=<username>
export OS_PASSWORD=<password>
export OS_PROJECT_NAME=<project-name>

You will also need to define the authentication url with --os-auth-url and the version of the API with --os-compute-api-version. Or set them as environment variables as well and set the OS_AUTH_URL to the keystone endpoint:

export OS_AUTH_URL=http://<url-to-openstack-keystone>:5000/v3/
export OS_COMPUTE_API_VERSION=2.1

Since Keystone can return multiple regions in the Service Catalog, you can specify the one you want with --os-region-name (or export OS_REGION_NAME). It defaults to the first in the list returned.

You'll find complete documentation on the shell by running nova help

Python API

There's also a complete Python API, with documentation linked below.

To use with keystone as the authentication system:

>>> from keystoneauth1.identity import v3
>>> from keystoneauth1 import session
>>> from novaclient import client
>>> auth = v3.Password(auth_url='http://example.com:5000/v3',
...                    username='username',
...                    password='password',
...                    project_name='project-name',
...                    user_domain_id='default',
...                    project_domain_id='default')
>>> sess = session.Session(auth=auth)
>>> nova = client.Client("2.1", session=sess)
>>> nova.flavors.list()
[...]
>>> nova.servers.list()
[...]
>>> nova.keypairs.list()
[...]

Testing

There are multiple test targets that can be run to validate the code.

• tox -e pep8 - style guidelines enforcement
• tox -e py27 - traditional unit testing
• tox -e functional - live functional testing against an existing openstack

Functional testing assumes the existence of a clouds.yaml file as supported by os-client-config (http://docs.openstack.org/developer/os-client-config) It assumes the existence of a cloud named devstack that behaves like a normal devstack installation with a demo and an admin user/tenant - or clouds named functional_admin and functional_nonadmin.