Gophercloud: an OpenStack SDK for Go

Gophercloud is an OpenStack Go SDK.

Useful links

• Reference documentation
• Effective Go

How to install

Reference a Gophercloud package in your code:

import "github.com/gophercloud/gophercloud"

Then update your go.mod:

go mod tidy

Getting started

Credentials

Because you'll be hitting an API, you will need to retrieve your OpenStack credentials and either store them in a clouds.yaml file, as environment variables, or in your local Go files. The first method is recommended because it decouples credential information from source code, allowing you to push the latter to your version control system without any security risk.

You will need to retrieve the following:

• A valid Keystone identity URL
• Credentials. These can be a username/password combo, a set of Application Credentials, a pre-generated token, or any other supported authentication mechanism.

For users that have the OpenStack dashboard installed, there's a shortcut. If you visit the project/api_access path in Horizon and click on the "Download OpenStack RC File" button at the top right hand corner, you can download either a clouds.yaml file or an openrc bash file that exports all of your access details to environment variables. To use the clouds.yaml file, place it at ~/.config/openstack/clouds.yaml. To use the openrc file, run source openrc and you will be prompted for your password.

Authentication

Once you have access to your credentials, you can begin plugging them into Gophercloud. The next step is authentication, which is handled by a base "Provider" struct. There are number of ways to construct such a struct.

With gophercloud/utils

The github.com/gophercloud/utils library provides the clientconfig package to simplify authentication. It provides additional functionality, such as the ability to read clouds.yaml files. To generate a "Provider" struct using the clientconfig package:

import (
	"github.com/gophercloud/utils/openstack/clientconfig"
)

// You can also skip configuring this and instead set 'OS_CLOUD' in your
// environment
opts := new(clientconfig.ClientOpts)
opts.Cloud = "devstack-admin"

provider, err := clientconfig.AuthenticatedClient(opts)

A provider client is a top-level client that all of your OpenStack service clients derive from. The provider contains all of the authentication details that allow your Go code to access the API - such as the base URL and token ID.

Once we have a base Provider, we inject it as a dependency into each OpenStack service. For example, in order to work with the Compute API, we need a Compute service client. This can be created like so:

client, err := clientconfig.NewServiceClient("compute", opts)

Without gophercloud/utils

Note gophercloud doesn't provide support for clouds.yaml file so you need to implement this functionality yourself if you don't wish to use gophercloud/utils.

You can also generate a "Provider" struct without using the clientconfig package from gophercloud/utils. To do this, you can either pass in your credentials explicitly or tell Gophercloud to use environment variables:

import (
	"github.com/gophercloud/gophercloud"
	"github.com/gophercloud/gophercloud/openstack"
)

// Option 1: Pass in the values yourself
opts := gophercloud.AuthOptions{
  IdentityEndpoint: "https://openstack.example.com:5000/v2.0",
  Username: "{username}",
  Password: "{password}",
}

// Option 2: Use a utility function to retrieve all your environment variables
opts, err := openstack.AuthOptionsFromEnv()

Once you have the opts variable, you can pass it in and get back a ProviderClient struct:

provider, err := openstack.AuthenticatedClient(opts)

As above, you can then use this provider client to generate a service client for a particular OpenStack service:

client, err := openstack.NewComputeV2(provider, gophercloud.EndpointOpts{
	Region: os.Getenv("OS_REGION_NAME"),
})

Provision a server

We can use the Compute service client generated above for any Compute API operation we want. In our case, we want to provision a new server. To do this, we invoke the Create method and pass in the flavor ID (hardware specification) and image ID (operating system) we're interested in:

import "github.com/gophercloud/gophercloud/openstack/compute/v2/servers"

server, err := servers.Create(client, servers.CreateOpts{
	Name:      "My new server!",
	FlavorRef: "flavor_id",
	ImageRef:  "image_id",
}).Extract()

The above code sample creates a new server with the parameters, and embodies the new resource in the server variable (a servers.Server struct).

Advanced Usage

Have a look at the FAQ for some tips on customizing the way Gophercloud works.

Backwards-Compatibility Guarantees

Gophercloud versioning follows semver.

Before v1.0.0, there were no guarantees. Starting with v1, there will be no breaking changes within a major release.

See the Release instructions.

Contributing

See the contributing guide.

Help and feedback

If you're struggling with something or have spotted a potential bug, feel free to submit an issue to our bug tracker.