After our recent splash at ODS in Vancouver, it seems that there is a lot of interest in writing some python code to drive LXD to do various things. The first option is to use pylxd, a project maintained by a friend of mine at Canonical named Chuck Short. However, the primary client of this is OpenStack, and thus it is python2. We also don't want to add a lot of dependencies in this module, so we're using raw python urllib and friends, which as you know can sometimes be...painful :)

Another option would be to use python's awesome requests module, which is considerably more user friendly. However, since LXD uses client certificates, it can be a bit challenging to get the basic bits going. Here's a small program that just does some GETs to the API, to see how it might work:

import os.path

import requests

conf_dir = os.path.expanduser('~/.config/lxc')
crt = os.path.join(conf_dir, 'client.crt')
key = os.path.join(conf_dir, 'client.key')

print(requests.get('https://127.0.0.1:8443/1.0', verify=False, cert=(crt, key)).text)

which gives me (piped through jq for sanity):

$ python3 lxd.py | jq .
{
  "type": "sync",
  "status": "Success",
  "status_code": 200,
  "metadata": {
    "api_compat": 1,
    "auth": "trusted",
    "config": {
      "trust-password": true
    },
    "environment": {
      "backing_fs": "ext4",
      "driver": "lxc",
      "kernel_version": "3.19.0-15-generic",
      "lxc_version": "1.1.2",
      "lxd_version": "0.9"
    }
  }
}

It just piggy backs on the lxc client generated certificates for now, but it would be great to have some python code that could generate those as well!

Another bit I should point out for people is lxd's --debug flag, which prints out every request it receives and response that it sends. I found this useful while developing the default lxc client, and it will probably be useful to those of you out there who are developing your own clients.

Happy hacking!