The Tuesday CloudStack Silly Hack

The problem with middleware/backend work is that nobody sees what you do and since I am terrible at graphics/design and know nothing of User Interface principles I am pretty much stuck in the dark. So today I invested couple hours on the Tuesday Silly CloudStack Hack. It is made of Flask, a good read, Twitter Bootstrap and some stolen code from CloudMonkey

Flask is a terrific web microframework for Python. Of course I like Python so I think Flask is terrific. It is also great because you can use it to design clean REST services. Bootstrap is en vogue these days, and CloudMonkey, also written in Python is the new CloudStack command line interface boasting some cool features, like auto-completion, interactive shell and so on.

I will keep it short, grab requester.py from the CloudMonkey source tree, it will help you make API calls to a CloudStack instance. Create a simple script with flask, and set your CloudStack endpoint variables, plus the keys (I am using DevCloud):

import requester

from flask import Flask, url_for, render_template, request
app = Flask(__name__)

apikey='plgWJfZK4gyS3mOMTVmjUVg-X-jlWlnfaUJ9GAbBbf9EdM-kAYMmAiLqzzq1ElZLYq_u38zCm0bewzGUdP66mg'
secretkey='VDaACYb0LV9eNjTetIOElcVQkvJck_J_QljX_FcHRj87ZKiy0z0ty0ZsYBkoXkY9b7eq1EhwJaw7FF3akA3KBQ'
path='/client/api'
host='localhost'
port='8080'
protocol='http'

Setup a route that you will use to trigger a call to CloudStack. Something like this:

@app.route('/users')
def listusers():
    response, error = requester.make_request('listUsers',{},None,host,port,apikey,secretkey,protocol,path)
    resp=json.loads(str(response))
    return render_template('users.html',users=resp['listusersresponse'])

Now Download Bootstrap and stick it in a static directory in your Flask application. Then create html template files using the jinja2 syntax, something like this:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block content %}

{% if users %}
{{ users }}
{% else %}
Hello World!
{% endif %}

{% endblock content %}
sebmini:templates sebastiengoasguen$ 

Now run the app with Python and hit http://localhost:5000 and bang, you just got yourself your quarter end Bonus....! Well not quite, but that's a start :)

Joke aside, this should be the start of a fun Google Summer of Code project, I will put it on github if there is interest. Also if you want another silly hack, push requester.py to your android phone and using SL4a you can make calls to CloudStack from your phone...Silly CloudStack Wednesday hack anyone ?