Sahara UI Dev Environment Setup

This page describes how to setup the Sahara dashboard UI component by either installing it as part of DevStack or installing it in an isolated environment and running from the command line.

Install as a part of DevStack

The easiest way to have a local Sahara UI environment with DevStack is to include the Sahara-Dashboard component in DevStack. This can be accomplished by modifying your DevStack local.conf file to enable sahara-dashboard. See the DevStack documentation for more information on installing and configuring DevStack.

If you are developing Sahara from an OSX environment you will need to run DevStack on a virtual machine. See Setup VM for DevStack on OSX for more information.

After Sahara-Dashboard installation as a part of DevStack, Horizon will contain a Sahara tab. Sahara-Dashboard source code will be located at $DEST/sahara-dashboard which is usually /opt/stack/sahara-dashboard.

Isolated Dashboard for Sahara

These installation steps serve two purposes:

1. Setup a dev environment
2. Setup an isolated Dashboard for Sahara

Note The host where you are going to perform installation has to be able to connect to all OpenStack endpoints. You can list all available endpoints using the following command:

$ keystone endpoint-list

1. Install prerequisites

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install git-core python-dev gcc python-setuptools python-virtualenv node-less libssl-dev libffi-dev

On Ubuntu 12.10 and higher you have to install the following lib as well:

$ sudo apt-get install nodejs-legacy

2. Checkout Horizon from git and switch to your version of OpenStack

Here is an example for the Icehouse release:

$ git clone https://github.com/openstack/horizon -b stable/icehouse

Then install the virtual environment:

$ python tools/install_venv.py

3. Create a local_settings.py file

$ cp openstack_dashboard/local/local_settings.py.example openstack_dashboard/local/local_settings.py

4. Modify openstack_dashboard/local/local_settings.py

Set the proper values for host and url variables:

OPENSTACK_HOST = "ip of your controller"
SAHARA_URL = "url for sahara (e.g. "http://localhost:8386/v1.1")"

If you are using Neutron instead of Nova-Network:

SAHARA_USE_NEUTRON = True

If you are using Nova-Network with auto_assign_floating_ip=False add the following parameter:

AUTO_ASSIGNMENT_ENABLED = False

5. Clone sahara-dashboard sources from https://github.com/openstack/sahara-dashboard.git

$ git clone https://github.com/openstack/sahara-dashboard.git

6. Export SAHARA_DASHBOARD_HOME environment variable with a path to sahara-dashboard folder

$ export SAHARA_DASHBOARD_HOME=$(pwd)/sahara-dashboard

7. Create a symlink to sahara-dashboard source

$ ln -s $SAHARA_DASHBOARD_HOME/saharadashboard .venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/saharadashboard

8. Install python-saharaclient into venv

$ .venv/bin/pip install python-saharaclient

9. Modify openstack_dashboard/settings.py

Add sahara to to the Horizon config:

HORIZON_CONFIG = {
    'dashboards': ('nova', 'syspanel', 'settings', 'sahara'),

and add saharadashboard to the installed apps:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'saharadashboard',
    ....

10. Start Horizon

$ tools/with_venv.sh python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080

This will start Horizon in debug mode. That means the logs will be written to console and if any exceptions happen, you will see the stack-trace rendered as a web-page.

Debug mode can be disabled by changing DEBUG=True to False in local_settings.py. In that case Horizon should be started slightly differently, otherwise it will not serve static files:

$ tools/with_venv.sh  python manage.py runserver --insecure 0.0.0.0:8080

Note It is not recommended to use Horizon in this mode for production.

11. Applying changes

If you have changed any *.py files in $SAHARA_DASHBOARD_HOME directory, Horizon will notice that and reload automatically. However changes made to non-python files may not be noticed, so you have to restart Horizon again manually, as described in step 10.