Stephen Finucane a2165cf651 doc: Populate the 'contributor' section

Per the spec [1]:

  contributor/ – anything related to contributing to the project or how
  the team is managed. Applies to some of the current content under
  /developer, we are changing the name to emphasize that not all
  contributors are developers and sometimes developers are users but not
  contributors.

We currently have a handful of docs that focus on the "how to develop or
contribute" aspects of nova, and these are moved. Docs that focus on
architecture or design decisions for nova are not moved, as these will
go into 'reference'.

A TODO is added to the former 'api_plugins' document as it's mega
out-of-date and needs some serious work.

[1] specs.openstack.org/openstack/docs-specs/specs/pike/os-manuals-migration

Change-Id: Iad770688b4eafeb9caa710b4398b02d80a017a70

2017-07-18 15:41:19 +01:00

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This should be merged into contributor/api

Adding a Method to the OpenStack API

The interface is a mostly RESTful API. REST stands for Representational State Transfer and provides an architecture "style" for distributed systems using HTTP for transport. Figure out a way to express your request and response in terms of resources that are being created, modified, read, or destroyed.

Routing

To map URLs to controllers+actions, OpenStack uses the Routes package, a clone of Rails routes for Python implementations. See http://routes.groovie.org/ for more information.

URLs are mapped to "action" methods on "controller" classes in nova/api/openstack/__init__/ApiRouter.__init__ .

See http://routes.groovie.org/manual.html for all syntax, but you'll probably just need these two:

mapper.connect() lets you map a single URL to a single action on a controller.
mapper.resource() connects many standard URLs to actions on a controller.

Controllers and actions

Controllers live in nova/api/openstack, and inherit from nova.wsgi.Controller.

See nova/api/openstack/compute/servers.py for an example.

Action methods take parameters that are sucked out of the URL by mapper.connect() or .resource(). The first two parameters are self and the WebOb request, from which you can get the req.environ, req.body, req.headers, etc.

Serialization

Actions return a dictionary, and wsgi.Controller serializes that to JSON.

Faults

If you need to return a non-200, you should return faults.Fault(webob.exc.HTTPNotFound()) replacing the exception as appropriate.

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