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 over the RPC channel, testing database migrations, and so forth.

Here we describe two ways to install and configure the dependencies, either run directly on your local machine or encapsulated in a virtual machine or container.

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 -evenv --notest --develop -r
   

3. Activate the virtual environment:

   . .tox/venv/bin/activate
   

4. Install the openstack client command utility:

   pip install python-openstackclient
   

5. Install the baremetal client:

   pip install python-ironicclient
   

   Note

   You can install python-ironicclient from source by cloning the git repository and running pip install . while in the root of the cloned repository.

6. 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/
   

Next, install and configure system dependencies.

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). If you want to use SQLite, skip it and do not set the connection option.

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"
   

   Note

   if you choose not to install mysql-server, ironic will default to using a local sqlite database. The database will then be stored in ironic/ironic.sqlite.

2. Create a configuration file within the ironic source directory:

   # generate a sample config
   tox -egenconfig
   
   # copy sample config and modify it as necessary
   cp etc/ironic/ironic.conf.sample etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   
   # disable auth since we are not running keystone here
   sed -i "s/#auth_strategy = keystone/auth_strategy = noauth/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   
   # use the 'fake-hardware' test hardware type
   sed -i "s/#enabled_hardware_types = .*/enabled_hardware_types = fake-hardware/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   
   # use the 'fake' deploy and boot interfaces
   sed -i "s/#enabled_deploy_interfaces = .*/enabled_deploy_interfaces = fake/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   sed -i "s/#enabled_boot_interfaces = .*/enabled_boot_interfaces = fake/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   
   # enable both fake and ipmitool management and power interfaces
   sed -i "s/#enabled_management_interfaces = .*/enabled_management_interfaces = fake,ipmitool/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   sed -i "s/#enabled_power_interfaces = .*/enabled_power_interfaces = fake,ipmitool/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   
   # change the periodic sync_power_state_interval to a week, to avoid getting NodeLocked exceptions
   sed -i "s/#sync_power_state_interval = 60/sync_power_state_interval = 604800/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   
   # if you opted to install mysql-server, switch the DB connection from sqlite to mysql
   sed -i "s/#connection = .*/connection = mysql\+pymysql:\/\/root:MYSQL_ROOT_PWD@localhost\/ironic/" etc/ironic/ironic.conf.local
   
   # use JSON RPC to avoid installing rabbitmq locally
   sed -i "s/#rpc_transport = oslo/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/venv/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/venv/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 and disable the authentication:

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
openstack help baremetal

# 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:

MAC="aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff"   # replace with the MAC of a data port on your node
IPMI_ADDR="1.2.3.4"       # replace with a real IP of the node BMC
IPMI_USER="admin"         # replace with the BMC's user name
IPMI_PASS="pass"          # replace with the BMC's password

# 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=$(baremetal node create \
       --driver fake-hardware \
       --management-interface ipmitool \
       --power-interface ipmitool \
       --driver-info ipmi_address=$IPMI_ADDR \
       --driver-info ipmi_username=$IPMI_USER \
       -f value -c uuid)

# driver info may also be added or updated later on
baremetal node set $NODE --driver-info ipmi_password=$IPMI_PASS

# add a network port
baremetal port create $MAC --node $NODE

# 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/venv/bin/activate
pip uninstall ironic
pip install -e .

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