Authenticate¶

When using the SDK, you must authenticate against an OpenStack endpoint before you can use OpenStack services. Because all projects use Keystone for authentication, the process is the same no matter which service or library you have decided to use. Each library also has more advanced and complicated ways to do things, should those be needed.

There are two basic ways to deal with your cloud config and credentials:

• Environment variables via an openrc.sh file
• clouds.yaml config file

The environment variables have been around the longest and are the form you are most likely to receive from your cloud provider. If you have one and only one cloud account, they are the most convenient way.

clouds.yaml is a bit newer and was designed to help folks who have more than one OpenStack cloud that they are using.