Heat and Devstack

Heat is fully integrated into DevStack. This is a convenient way to try out or develop heat alongside the current development state of all the other OpenStack projects. Heat on DevStack works on both Ubuntu and Fedora.

These instructions assume you already have a working DevStack installation which can launch basic instances.

Configure DevStack to enable Heat

Heat is configured by default on devstack for Icehouse or newer versions of OpenStack.

It would also be useful to automatically download and register a VM image that Heat can launch. To do that add the following to your devstack localrc:

IMAGE_URLS+=",http://cloud.fedoraproject.org/fedora-20.x86_64.qcow2"

URLs for any cloud image may be specified, but fedora images from F20 contain the heat-cfntools package which is required for some heat functionality.

That is all the configuration that is required. When you run ./stack.sh the Heat processes will be launched in screen with the labels prefixed with h-.

Configure DevStack to enable Ceilometer (if using Alarms)

To use Ceilometer Alarms you need to enable Ceilometer in devstack. Adding the following lines to your localrc file will enable the ceilometer services:

CEILOMETER_BACKEND=mongo
enable_service ceilometer-acompute ceilometer-acentral ceilometer-collector ceilometer-api
enable_service ceilometer-alarm-notifier ceilometer-alarm-evaluator

Confirming Heat is responding

Before any Heat commands can be run, the authentication environment needs to be loaded:

source openrc

You can confirm that Heat is running and responding with this command:

heat stack-list

This should return an empty line

Preparing Nova for running stacks

Enabling Heat in devstack will replace the default Nova flavors with flavours that the Heat example templates expect. You can see what those flavors are by running:

nova flavor-list

Heat needs to launch instances with a keypair, so we need to generate one:

nova keypair-add heat_key > heat_key.priv
chmod 600 heat_key.priv

Launching a stack

Now lets launch a stack, using an example template from the heat-templates repository:

heat stack-create teststack -u
https://raw.github.com/openstack/heat-templates/master/cfn/F17/WordPress_Single_Instance.template -P "InstanceType=m1.large;DBUsername=wp;DBPassword=verybadpassword;KeyName=heat_key;LinuxDistribution=F17"

Which will respond:

+--------------------------------------+-----------+--------------------+----------------------+
| ID                                   | Name      | Status             | Created              |
+--------------------------------------+-----------+--------------------+----------------------+
| (uuid)                               | teststack | CREATE_IN_PROGRESS | (timestamp)          |
+--------------------------------------+-----------+--------------------+----------------------+

List stacks

List the stacks in your tenant:

heat stack-list

List stack events

List the events related to a particular stack:

heat event-list teststack

Describe the wordpress stack

Show detailed state of a stack:

heat stack-show teststack

Note: After a few seconds, the stack_status should change from IN_PROGRESS to CREATE_COMPLETE.

Verify instance creation

Because the software takes some time to install from the repository, it may be a few minutes before the Wordpress instance is in a running state.

Point a web browser at the location given by the WebsiteURL Output as shown by heat stack-show teststack:

wget ${WebsiteURL}

Delete the instance when done

Note: The list operation will show no running stack.:

heat stack-delete teststack
heat stack-list

Adding new users to DevStack

When DevStack is configured and launched with stack.sh script, Heat creates a specific role in Keystone (heat_stack_owner by default) and assigns this role to both default users created by DevStack (admin and demo). If you later create another user, and want this user to be able to use all capabilities of Heat, don’t forget to assign the heat_stack_owner role to this user too, otherwise the new user will not be allowed to create stacks.