python-openstackclient is a unified command-line client for the OpenStack APIs. It is a thin wrapper to the stock python-*client modules that implement the actual REST API client actions.

This is an implementation of the design goals shown in http://wiki.openstack.org/UnifiedCLI. The primary goal is to provide a unified shell command structure and a common language to describe operations in OpenStack.

python-openstackclient is designed to add support for API extensions via a plugin mechanism

The cli is configured via environment variables and command-line options as listed in http://wiki.openstack.org/UnifiedCLI/Authentication.

The 'password flow' variation is most commonly used:

export OS_AUTH_URL=<url-to-openstack-identity>
export OS_TENANT_NAME=<tenant-name>
export OS_USERNAME=<user-name>
export OS_PASSWORD=<password>    # yes, it isn't secure, we'll address it in the future

The corresponding command-line options look very similar:

--os-auth-url <url>
--os-tenant-name <tenant-name>
--os-username <user-name>
--os-password <password>

The token flow variation for authentication uses an already-aquired token and a URL pointing directly to the service API that presumably was acquired from the Service Catalog:

export OS_TOKEN=<token>
export OS_URL=<url-to-openstack-service>

The corresponding command-line options look very similar:

--os-token <token>
--os-url <url-to-openstack-service>

Additional command-line options and their associated environment variables are listed here:

--debug             # turns on some debugging of the API conversation
                      (via httplib2)
--verbose | -v      # Increase verbosity of output. Can be repeated.
--quiet | -q        # suppress output except warnings and errors
--help | -h         # show a help message and exit