OpenStack Dashboard

The OpenStack Dashboard is a reference implementation for the django-nova project. Both are housed on Launchpad.

To view a quick video tour of the dashboard in action, please see this blog post.

Prerequisites for Running The OpenStack Dashboard

Running OpenStack nova instance (nova-api and nova-compute) with EC2 API enabled
URL of your nova-api instance (this is usually something like http://localhost:8773/services/Cloud)
Valid nova admin user and user credentials (specifically, the username, the NOVA_ACCESS_KEY and NOVA_SECRET_KEY). These should be in your novarc file.
python 2.6 (not tested with python 3.0)

These instructions have only been tested on Ubuntu 10.10 server.

Installation Overview

The overall steps for building the dashboard are:

Get the source for both django-nova and openstack-dashboard from launchpad
(OPTIONAL) Build django-nova with the boostrap script and buildout commands as shown in the dajngo-nova README
Build and configure openstack-dashboard
Create the openstack-dashboard database (via the sync-db command)
Run the server

These instructions are for a test openstack-dashboard deployment. They configure your dashboard to use a sqlite3 database and the default django server. To create a more robust installation, you should configure this with an Apache webserver and MySQL/Postgres database.

Get The Source

To prevent any interruption to our hacking, let's grab all the code that we need.

Create Your Source Directory

$ mkdir src
$ cd src

Get django-nova

django-nova is the reference implementation of the openstack dashboard. This module contains almost all of the real code of the website.

$ mkdir django-nova
$ cd django-nova
$ bzr init-repo .
$ bzr branch lp:django-nova/trunk

You should now have a directory called trunk, which contains the reference implementation.

Get openstack-dashboard

openstack-dashboard provides all the look and feel for the dashboard.

$ cd ..
$ mkdir openstack-dashboard
$ cd openstack-dashboard
$ bzr init-repo .
$ bzr branch lp:openstack-dashboard trunk

You should now have a directory called trunk, which contains the OpenStack Dashboard application.

Build django-nova (OPTIONAL)

If you want to develop or modify the inner workings of django-nova, complete this step. If not, proceed to the next step.

We will now build the reference implementation that our OpenStack Dashboard will use.

    
$ cd ../django-nova/trunk
$ python bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout

These two commands (bootstrap.py and buildout) will install all the dependencies of django-nova.

Build and Configure openstack-dashboard

With the reference implementation built, it is now time to configure our Openstack Dashboard application. The first step in configuring the application is to create your local_settings.py file:

$ cd ../openstack-dashboard/trunk
$ cd local
$ cp local_settings.py.example local_settings.py
$ vi local_settings.py

In the local_settings.py file, we need to change three important options:

NOVA_DEFAULT_ENDPOINT : this needs to be set to nova-api instance URL from above. DO NOT KEEP THE DEFAULT as it contains a typo (localhoat instead of localhost). Use 'http://localhost:8773/services/Cloud' if you running the dashboard on the same machine as your nova-api
NOVA_ACCESS_KEY : this should be the EC2_ACCESS_KEY in your novarc file
NOVA_SECRET_KEY : this should be the EC2_SECRET_KEY in your novarc file

Now it's time to install the openstack-dashboard environment. This installs all the dependencies for openstack-dashboard (including the django-nova from earlier).

$ sudo easy_install virtualenv
$ python tools/install_venv.py ../../django-nova/trunk

This will take a bit as it needs to download a number of dependencies from the internet.

With that done, let's create the database:

$ tools/with_venv.sh dashboard/manage.py syncdb

This will ask you a few questions (follow the instructions within the * * to answer the questions):

    
    You just installed Django's auth system, which means you don't have any superusers defined.
    Would you like to create one now? (yes/no): *YES*
    Username (Leave blank to use 'root'): *ENTER YOUR CLOUD_SERVERS_USERNAME FROM NOVARC*
    E-mail address: *ENTER YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS*
    Password: *MAKE UP A PASSWORD*
    Password (again): *REPEAT YOUR PASSWORD*

If everything goes correctly, you shouldn't see any errors.

Run the Server

Now run the built-in server at a high port so that you can view your results

    $ tools/with_venv.sh dashboard/manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Make sure that your firewall isn't blocking TCP/8000 and just point your browser at this server on port 8000. If you are running the server on the same machine as your browser, this would be "http://localhost:8000".

OpenStackDashboard