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Installing Openstack Clients

Mac specific steps

This will help you get the Openstack clients working on Mac OS X 10.11.x and higher. It may work on recent older versions of Mac OS X but it has not been tested.

At this time, Python 3 is still not shipping on OS X. The latest Openstack clients require it.

Follow the instructions below at your own risk.

Task Command
Install Homebrew on your system yet
(this might take a few minutes):		 /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Using brew we’re going to install Python 3: brew install python
Now Python 3 is installed we can install
the OpenStack command line tools:		 sudo pip3 install python-openstackclient

Windows specific steps

We recommend that Windows users install Windows Subsystem for Linux and install Ubuntu within it. Microsoft has a learning module for this. The page Enable Windows Subsystem for Linux and install a distribution can walk you through that.

Once installed, you can verify python3 is installed by doing:

which python3

If you get an error, you may need to install Python3 by doing:

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip

Then you should be able to proceed to the Linux/common steps below

Common/Linux steps

Python3 is required.

Python 3 should already be installed by your operating system. Openstack CLI clients MUST be installed with Python3’s pip/pip3!

Task Command
Install the OpenStack clients pip install python-openstackclient

Additional clients that may also be useful depending on your custom needs are:
 
python-swiftclient, python-heatclient, python-magnumclient, python-manilaclient

For current users, clients that you likely no longer need to install are:
python-keystoneclient, python-novaclient, python-neutronclient, python-cinderclient, python-glanceclient
Set up your OpenStack credentials
See Authentication (Logging In) for details.		 source openrc.sh
Test an Open Stack command openstack flavor list
Following future OpenStack updates,
all installed pip modules can be updated
with this command:		 pip3 list --outdated --format=freeze | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1 | xargs -n1 pip3 install -U

Optional steps

Use virtual environments

Though not strictly necessary, we recommend using venv to increase the stability of the openstack cli tools.

Task Command
cd to your preferred directory

Create a directory for the project		 mkdir <project_name>
Change to the project directory cd <project_name>
Install the venv packages sudo python3 -m pip install --user virtualenv
Start the VirtualEnvironment software python3 -m venv env <project_name>
Activate the VirtualEnvironment for the project source <project_name>/bin/activate