Installing OpenStack's CLI tools on OS X

23 March, 2015

Here’s a quick guide for installing OpenStack’s CLI tools on OS X in a way that doesn’t make too much of a mess.

First up we need to get a couple of additional tools installed that will ‘pollute’ your base install, but once we’re there we can easily create ‘virtual’ Python development environments and install isolated sets of packages on a per-project basis. This includes creating an ‘openstack’ project in which we’ll install keystone, glance, and so on.

$ sudo easy_install pip
$ sudo pip install virtualenv
$ sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

With those three things in place, we can then set about configuring a home directory for our virtual Python environments:

$ mkdir .virtualenv
$ source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

Stick that last line into one of your shell’s startup files. In my case that’s ZSH so I’ve added the following to my ~/.zshrc:

# virtualenv junk
[[ -s "/usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh" ]] && source "/usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh"

Now let’s go and create an OpenStack Python development environment:

$ mkvirtualenv openstack

To work on this environment at any time, do:

$ workon openstack

At which point we can go ahead and install the various command-line tools and their dependances all within this environment:

$ (openstack)nick@deadline:~> pip install python-{keystone,glance,nova,neutron,cinder}client
Downloading/unpacking python-keystoneclient
	Downloading python_keystoneclient-1.2.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (392kB): 392kB downloaded
Downloading/unpacking python-glanceclient
	Downloading python_glanceclient-0.17.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (84kB): 84kB downloaded

[..]

Successfully installed python-keystoneclient python-glanceclient python-novaclient python-neutronclient oslo.serialization six oslo.utils oslo.config oslo.i18n msgpack-python netifaces

And we’re done - all you have to remember is that each time you want to use these CLI tools you’ll need to first do workon openstack.