Working with Devstack

This post is for all those who are just starting with OpenStack. The easiest and best way
to start your journey in OpenStack Development would be through Devstack. So I will
walk you through the basic OpenStack setup using Devstack and some useful things that
would help you while you use Devstack.
It is recommended to use virtual machine to install Devstack as you can easily get rid of
it without having much to loose, in case of any crashes. Also it would save time if you
keep a snapshot of the Devstack setup on the virtual machine so that in the future you
would save the installation time. So lets begin with the setup!

Initial Setup
I am using 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 for demonstrating the setup.
1.Install VirtualBox

2.Create a new virtual machine with minimum 2GB RAM (required for Devstack
to run well) and install 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04
3.Run the virtual machine
4.Open the console
5.Run an update

$ sudo apt-get update

6.Install git

$ sudo apt-get install git

Setting up Devstack
Devstack is a shell script used to deploy a complete OpenStack development
environment. The Devstack script installs all the dependencies required to run
OpenStack so there is no need to install anything separately. It is a good place to start for
beginners starting with OpenStack development.
1.Open the console and clone the devstack repo which contains a script that will install
OpenStack. You should clone this repo where you want your devstack to reside. This command
 will fetch the devstack repo to your local machine.

$ git clone https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git

2.Now you will find a devstack directory where you cloned the repo

$ cd devstack
3.Run the script to install OpenStack

$ ./stack.sh
The script will take some time to build. It will ask you to enter passwords for the default
services enabled in the script.
After it is done it will return a URL for horizon. Open that link in your browser and you
can acess the OpenStack Dashboard!
By default you get two usernames-admin and demo. The password will be the password
you set for keystone(which is the identity service provided by OpenStack) which you
can see in the local.config file in the devstack directory too.
Here you are, done with the basic configuration for OpenStack!
(Reminder - Don`t forget to take a snapshot of the virtual machine once you have
reached this point!)

What the scripts do?

Now if you take a look at your devstack directory you will find some very useful scripts.
Here I will tell you how these scripts are used.
1.stack.sh
We have run this script initially to install Openstack. This script allows you to specify
configuration options of what git repositories to use, enabled services, network configuration
and various passwords. You need to run this script everytime you make any change to the
OpenStack configuration or enable any new service.

2.unstack.sh
Stops all the services started by stack.sh (mostly) mysql and rabbit are left running as
OpenStack code refreshes do not require them to be restarted. Note that any changes made to
the code should remain intact after running unstack.sh unless set otherwise.

3.rejoin-stack.sh
This script rejoins an existing screen, or re-creates a screen session from a previous run of
stack.sh. This means that if you have previously run stack.sh and you want to rejoin the session
 you run rejoin-stack.sh. Doing this restores all the data from the previous sessions. So do not be
scared of loosing your data after rebooting your machine.
Just run ./unstack.sh
Then, reboot your machine
When you want to join the session again run ./rejoin-stack.sh
And you have all your data in place! You can check by accessing the dashboard on the same
URL as before.

4.run_test.sh
OpenStack havana release added a tool called bash8 in order to do style checking in Devstack.
This tool is run on the entire project using run_test.sh script. This will give information
regarding any stray white spaces.

5.clean.sh
Does its best to eradicate traces of a Grenade run except for the following: - both base and target
code repos are left alone - packages (system and pip) are left alone. This is used if you want to
erase all the OpenStack related files from your system.

6.exercise.sh
This script runs all the examples present in the devstack/exercises directory and reports on the
results. The exercises directory contains the test scripts used to validate and demonstrate some
OpenStack functions. These scripts know how to exit early or skip services that are not enabled.

Configuring services in OpenStack

The stackrc is the primary configuration file for DevStack which contains all of the
settings that control the services started and the repositories used to download the source
for those services. stackrc sources the local.config to perform the default overrides.
By default the following services are enabled when you install OpenStack using
Devstack:
Nova (API, Certificate, Object Store, Compute, Network, Scheduler, VNC
proxies, Certificate Authentication)
Cinder (Scheduler, API, Volume)
Glance (API and Registry)
Horizon
Keystone
MYSQL
 RabbitMQ
Tempest
Additional services that are not enabled by default can be enabled in the local.config.
local.config should be copied from devstack/samples to the main devstack folder. Any
tweaks to the configuration like disabling any service can be done from the local.config
Now we will see how to enable the other services in OpenStack. Some services that are
not enabled by default are given below. Select the required service and add the
respective lines to your local.config.
Swift - Object Storage
ENABLED_SERVICES+=,s-proxy,s-object,s-container,s-account

Ceilometer - Metering Service

ENABLED_SERVICES+=,ceilometer-acompute,ceilometer-acentral,ceilometer-
collector,ceilometer-api
ENABLED_SERVICES+=,ceilometer-alarm-notify,ceilometer-alarm-eval

Neutron - Networking Service

ENABLED_SERVICES+=,q-svc,q-agt,q-dhcp,q-l3,q-meta,neutron

Heat - Orchestration Service

ENABLED_SERVICES+=,heat,h-api,h-api-cfn,h-api-cw,h-eng

Apache fronted for WSGI

APACHE_ENABLED_SERVICES+=keystone,swift

Enable Logging
You can also enable logging in Devstack, as it does not log by default.
LOGFILE=/opt/stack/logs/stack.sh.log
VERBOSE=True
LOG_COLOR=True
SCREEN_LOGDIR=/opt/stack/logs

Reclone each time

If you want to reclone the Devstack repo each time you run stack.sh then you can enable
reclone too in the local.config.
RECLONE=yes
After adding the required service you will need to run stack.sh again in order to enable
the service. To check if the service is enables you can check the OpenStack Dashboard
admin tab -> System Info -> services.

Where to find the code?

Once you have all the setup running you might want to take a look at the code running
behind all this. All the code related to OpenStack will be found here in
/opt/stack

Now you can start exploring the code right away!

References
Some of the links I referred to when I started:-
The official Devstack site.
OpenStack Developer Documents.