There are many tools available to interface with the CloudStack API. Apache Libcloud is one of those. In this section we provide a basic example of how to use Libcloud with CloudStack. It assumes that you have access to a CloudStack endpoint and that you have the API access key and secret key of a user.
To install Libcloud refer to the libcloud website. If you are familiar with Pypi simply do:
pip install apache-libcloud
You should see the following output:
pip install apache-libcloud
Downloading/unpacking apache-libcloud
Downloading apache-libcloud-0.12.4.tar.bz2 (376kB): 376kB downloaded
Running setup.py egg_info for package apache-libcloud
Installing collected packages: apache-libcloud
Running setup.py install for apache-libcloud
Successfully installed apache-libcloud
Cleaning up...
You can then open a Python interactive shell, create an instance of a CloudStack driver and call the available methods via the libcloud API.
>>> from libcloud.compute.types import Provider
>>> from libcloud.compute.providers import get_driver
>>> Driver = get_driver(Provider.CLOUDSTACK)
>>> apikey='plgWJfZK4gyS3mOMTVmjUVg-X-jlWlnfaUJ9GAbBbf9EdM-kAYMmAiLqzzq1ElZLYq_u38zCm0bewzGUdP66mg'
>>> secretkey='VDaACYb0LV9eNjTetIOElcVQkvJck_J_QljX_FcHRj87ZKiy0z0ty0ZsYBkoXkY9b7eq1EhwJaw7FF3akA3KBQ'
>>> host='http://localhost:8080'
>>> path='/client/api'
>>> conn=Driver(apikey,secretkey,secure='False',host='localhost:8080',path=path)
>>> conn=Driver(key=apikey,secret=secretkey,secure=False,host='localhost',port='8080',path=path)
>>> conn.list_images()
[<NodeImage: id=13ccff62-132b-4caf-b456-e8ef20cbff0e, name=tiny Linux, driver=CloudStack ...>]
>>> conn.list_sizes()
[<NodeSize: id=ef2537ad-c70f-11e1-821b-0800277e749c, name=tinyOffering, ram=100 disk=0 bandwidth=0 price=0 driver=CloudStack ...>, <NodeSize: id=c66c2557-12a7-4b32-94f4-48837da3fa84, name=Small Instance, ram=512 disk=0 bandwidth=0 price=0 driver=CloudStack ...>, <NodeSize: id=3d8b82e5-d8e7-48d5-a554-cf853111bc50, name=Medium Instance, ram=1024 disk=0 bandwidth=0 price=0 driver=CloudStack ...>]
>>> images=conn.list_images()
>>> offerings=conn.list_sizes()
>>> node=conn.create_node(name='toto',image=images[0],size=offerings[0])
>>> help(node)
>>> node.get_uuid()
'b1aa381ba1de7f2d5048e248848993d5a900984f'
>>> node.name
u'toto'
One of the interesting use cases of Libcloud is that you can use multiple Cloud Providers, such as AWS, Rackspace, OpenNebula, vCloud and so on. You can then create Driver instances to each of these clouds and create your own multi cloud application.
