Troubleshooting Openstack API¶

This document describes how to test that your OpenStack API is responding correctly to requests.

The following HTTP request examples uses httpie to perform the requests to the API endpoints.

We will need to export some variables before we can send requests to the authentication and compute APIs.

Name	Description	Example value
OS_IDENTITY_ENDPOINT	The endpoint to authenticate to openstack. This is normally running on port 5000. If you are using HTTPS, then please ensure you have a valid certificate. VISA API Server will throw an error if the certificate is invalid (i.e. self-signed)	http://openstack.example.com:5000
OS_COMPUTE_ENDPOINT	The endpoint for issue compute requests to openstack. This is normally running on port 8774. If you are using HTTPS, then please ensure you have a valid certificate. VISA API Server will throw an error if the certificate is invalid (i.e. self-signed)	http://openstack.example.com:8774
OS_APPLICATION_ID	Please see here for documentation about application credentials	N/A
OS_APPLICATION_SECRET	Please see here for documentation about application credentials

Authenticating to Openstack¶

Using the exported variables, we can now test the authentication to openstack. Please see here for documentation about the endpoint we are calling.

http -v --header POST $OS_IDENTITY_ENDPOINT/v3/auth/tokens auth:='{"identity":{"methods":["application_credential"],"application_credential":{"id":"'"$OS_APPLICATION_ID"'","secret":"'"$OS_APPLICATION_SECRET"'"}}}'

You will get a 201 Created response if the authentication was successful. If it wasn’t successful then please check your openstack configuration.

Remove the --header option if you want to see the full response instead of just the headers.

An example response:

{
    "token": {
        "methods": [
            "token"
        ],
        "expires_at": "2015-11-05T22:00:11.000000Z",
        "user": {
            "domain": {
                "id": "default",
                "name": "Default"
            },
            "id": "10a2e6e717a245d9acad3e5f97aeca3d",
            "name": "admin",
            "password_expires_at": null
        },
        "audit_ids": [
            "mAjXQhiYRyKwkB4qygdLVg"
        ],
        "issued_at": "2015-11-05T21:00:33.819948Z"
    }
}

Example headers:

HTTP/1.1 201 CREATED
Connection: close
Content-Length: 6141
Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self' https: wss:;
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2021 08:23:48 GMT
Server: nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)
Vary: X-Auth-Token
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: DENY
X-Subject-Token: a_super_long_token
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
x-openstack-request-id: req-af187d54-8ee6-4625-9675-4kahcjaja

To get the authentication token, the header we want is called X-Subject-Token. This token has a lifetime as defined in the expires_at attribute in the response and it will be used for performing requests to the Compute API.

Testing the Compute API¶

Export the token and called it OS_SUBJECT_TOKEN

Fetch a list of instances:

http -v GET $OS_COMPUTE_ENDPOINT/v2/servers/detail X-Auth-Token:$OS_SUBJECT_TOKEN

Fetch a list of flavours:

http -v GET $OS_COMPUTE_ENDPOINT/v2/flavors/detail X-Auth-Token:$OS_SUBJECT_TOKEN