Exercising Ironic Services Locally

It can sometimes be helpful to run Ironic services locally, without needing a full devstack environment or a server in a remote datacenter.

If you would like to exercise the Ironic services in isolation within your local environment, you can do this without starting any other OpenStack services. For example, this is useful for rapidly prototyping and debugging interactions between client and API, exploring the Ironic API for the first time, and basic testing.

This guide assumes you have already installed all required Ironic prerequisites, as documented in the prerequisites section of Unit Testing Environment.

Using tox

Ironic provides a tox environment suitable for running a single-process Ironic against sqlite. This utilizes the config in tools/ironic.conf.localdev to setup a simple, all-in-one Ironic service useful for testing.

By default, this configuration uses sqlite with a backing file ironic/ironic.sqlite. Deleting this file and restarting ironic will reset you to a blank state.

Setup

  1. If you haven’t already downloaded the source code, do that first:

    cd ~
git clone https://opendev.org/openstack/ironic
cd ironic

  2. Run the ironic all-in-one process:

    tox -elocal-ironic-dev

  3. In another window, utilize the client inside the tox venv:

    . .tox/local-ironic-dev/bin/activate
export OS_AUTH_TYPE=none
export OS_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:6385
baremetal driver list

  4. Press CTRL+C in the window running tox -elocal-ironic-dev when you are done.

Manually

You may wish to do this manually in order to give you more granular control over library versions and configurations, to enable usage of a database server backend, or to spin up a non-all-in-one Ironic.

Step 1: Create a Python virtualenv

  1. If you haven’t already downloaded the source code, do that first:

    cd ~
git clone https://opendev.org/openstack/ironic
cd ironic

  2. Create the Python virtualenv:

    tox -elocal-ironic-dev --notest --develop -r

  3. Activate the virtual environment:

    . .tox/local-ironic-dev/bin/activate

    Note

    This installs python-openstackclient and python-ironicclient from pypi. You can instead install them from source by cloning the git repository, activating the venv, and running pip install -e . while in the root of the git repo.

  4. Export some ENV vars so the client will connect to the local services that you’ll start in the next section:

    export OS_AUTH_TYPE=none
export OS_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:6385/

Step 2: Install System Dependencies Locally

This step will install MySQL on your local system. This may not be desirable in some situations (eg, you’re developing from a laptop and do not want to run a MySQL server on it all the time).

  1. Install mysql-server:

    Ubuntu/Debian:

    sudo apt-get install mysql-server

    RHEL/CentOS/Fedora:

    sudo dnf install mariadb mariadb-server
sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
    openSUSE/SLE::

    sudo zypper install mariadb sudo systemctl start mysql.service

    If using MySQL, you need to create the initial database:

    mysql -u root -pMYSQL_ROOT_PWD -e "create schema ironic"

  2. Use the localdev config as a template, and modify it:

    # copy sample config and modify it as necessary
cp tools/ironic.conf.localdev etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local

# Add mysql database connection information to config
echo -e "\n[database]" >> etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
echo -e "connection = mysql+pymysql://root:MYSQL_ROOT_PWD@localhost/ironic" >> etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local

# disable single-process mode and enable json-rpc
sed -i "s/rpc_transport = none/rpc_transport = json-rpc/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local

Step 3: Start the Services

From within the python virtualenv, run the following command to prepare the database before you start the ironic services:

# initialize the database for ironic
ironic-dbsync --config-file etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local create_schema

Next, open two new terminals for this section, and run each of the examples here in a separate terminal. In this way, the services will not be run as daemons; you can observe their output and stop them with Ctrl-C at any time.

  1. Start the API service in debug mode and watch its output:

    cd ~/ironic
. .tox/local-ironic-dev/bin/activate
ironic-api -d --config-file etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local

  2. Start the Conductor service in debug mode and watch its output:

    cd ~/ironic
. .tox/local-ironic-dev/bin/activate
ironic-conductor -d --config-file etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local

Step 4: Interact with the running services

You should now be able to interact with ironic via the python client, which is present in the python virtualenv, and observe both services’ debug outputs in the other two windows. This is a good way to test new features or play with the functionality without necessarily starting DevStack.

To get started, export the following variables to point the client at the local instance of ironic:

export OS_AUTH_TYPE=none
export OS_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:6385

Then list the available commands and resources:

# get a list of available commands
baremetal help

# get the list of drivers currently supported by the available conductor(s)
baremetal driver list

# get a list of nodes (should be empty at this point)
baremetal node list

Here is an example walkthrough of creating a node:

# enroll the node with the fake hardware type and IPMI-based power and
# management interfaces. Note that driver info may be added at node
# creation time with "--driver-info"
NODE=$(baremetal node create --driver fake-hardware -f value -c uuid)

# node info may also be added or updated later on
baremetal node set $NODE --driver-info fake_driver_info=fake
baremetal node set $NODE --extra extradata=isfun

# view the information for the node
baremetal node show $NODE

# request that the node's driver validate the supplied information
baremetal node validate $NODE

# you have now enrolled a node sufficiently to be able to control
# its power state from ironic!
baremetal node power on $NODE

If you make some code changes and want to test their effects, simply stop the services with Ctrl-C and restart them.

Step 5: Fixing your test environment

If you are testing changes that add or remove python entrypoints, or making significant changes to ironic’s python modules, or simply keep the virtualenv around for a long time, your development environment may reach an inconsistent state. It may help to delete cached “.pyc” files, update dependencies, reinstall ironic, or even recreate the virtualenv. The following commands may help with that, but are not an exhaustive troubleshooting guide:

# clear cached pyc files
cd ~/ironic/ironic
find ./ -name '*.pyc' | xargs rm

# reinstall ironic modules
cd ~/ironic
. .tox/local-ironic-dev/bin/activate
pip uninstall ironic
pip install -e .

# install and upgrade ironic and all python dependencies
cd ~/ironic
. .tox/local-ironic-dev/bin/activate
pip install -U -e .