Ironic

Ironic is an Incubated OpenStack project which aims to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual machines, forked from the Nova Baremetal driver.

Project Resources

Project status, bugs, and blueprints are tracked on Launchpad:

http://launchpad.net/ironic

Additional resources are linked from the project wiki page:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic

Developers wishing to contribute to an OpenStack project should find plenty of helpful resources here:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Getting_Started

All OpenStack projects use Gerrit for code reviews. A good reference for that is here:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GerritWorkflow

Project Architecture

An Ironic deployment will be composed of the following components:

• A RESTful API service, by which operators and other services may interact with the managed bare metal servers.
• A Manager service, which does the bulk of the work. Functionality is exposed via the API service. The Manager and API services communicate via RPC.
• An internal driver API for different Manager functions. There are currently two driver types: BMCDriver and DeploymentDriver.
• Internal drivers for each function are dynamically loaded, according to the specific hardware being managed, such that heterogeneous hardware deployments can be managed by a single Manager service.
• One or more Deployment Agents, which provide local control over the hardware which is not available remotely to the Manager. A ramdisk should be built which contains one of these agents, eg. with https://github.com/stackforge/diskimage-builder, and this ramdisk can be booted on-demand. The agent is never run inside a tenant instance.
• A Database and a DB API for storing persistent state of the Manager and Drivers.

Development

Ironic source code should be pulled directly from git:

git clone https://github.com/openstack/ironic

Setting up a local environment for development can be done with tox:

cd <your_src_dir>/ironic

# install prerequisites
* Ubuntu/Debian:
sudo apt-get install python-dev swig libssl-dev python-pip libmysqlclient-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev
* Fedora/RHEL:
sudo yum install python-devel swig openssl-devel python-pip mysql-libs libxml2-devel libxslt-devel

sudo easy_install nose
sudo pip install virtualenv setuptools-git flake8

# create virtualenv
tox -evenv -- echo 'done'

# activate the virtualenv
source .tox/venv/bin/activate

# run pep8/flake8 checks
flake8

# run unit tests
testr run

# deactivate the virtualenv
deactivate