1. Installation

There are several install options for OTC Extensions to enhance the native OpenStack Client and to extend the OpenStack SDK. Once installed, they cover additional Open Telekom Cloud services and provide extra functionality on top of the stock OpenStack SDK and CLI.

• Installation with PiP Installer
  • PiP Installation in User Space
    • Ubuntu or Debian
    • CentOS
    • Fedora
  • PiP Installation within a Virtual Environment
    • Ubuntu or Debian
    • CentOS
    • Fedora
• Installation from GitHub sources

Overview of Related Packages

The OTC Extensions are, as most software in OpenStack, written in Python and are eventually a Python package. These packages come with dependencies to other packages. Usually a package manager such as pip is used to resolve those dependencies or all requirements are bundled in a single packet. These are the main packages and their relations to each other:

OpenStack SDK: A library on the client side that translates Python function calls into API calls to an OpenStack cloud. It depends only on other, internal Python packages.

OpenStack Client: An application that turns the Python interface of OpenStack SDK and OTC Extensions into a CLI tool. If installed, it requires the SDK.

OTC Extensions: An addition to OpenStack SDK with enhanced functionality that is specific for the Open Telekom Cloud. This is the package you are currently looking at. It requires the SDK since it extends its interfaces. If it is installed as a Python package it is detected and integrated automatically by the other two packages without further installation or configuration.

So effectively, using a package manager like pip it is sufficient to install the packages like this:

$ pip install openstackclient otcextensions

Other packaging methods may or may not have these dependencies built in already.

Installation Options

There are a number of alternatives available to install OTC Extensions (including the SDK and CLI):

• Installing from operating system packages (deb, rpm, yum, dnf): This is a very easy way that is also easy to revert. The downside of this aproach is that operating system packages for the major distributions are often quite outdated, as many of the internal dependencies are also often outdated. You often experience a backlog of several months up to years behind the latest development.

• Installing with a Python package manager (pip): Python comes with its own package manager pip for the Python Package Index (PyPI). That is today the standard way to install Python packages. All other described options use this method under the hood. This way is operating system independent. Installing with pip comes with three sub-options: Installing system-wide, for a single user, or inside a virtual environemt. This is the recommended way to install OTC Extensions.

• Installing from sources: All related projects are hosted on public source code repositories. So if you need a bleeding edge feature or want to contribute directly to the project yourself, installation from sources is for you. It requires some extra steps, though.

There are also ready-made installation packages for various operating systems which have their own versions, package names and sometimes bugs. A repository based on openSUSE’s build services tries to cover these issues which is available under: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/Cloud:OTC:Tools:OpenStack.

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