Preparing Ansible to work with OpenStack

OpenStack exposes a set of web APIs that can be used to manage resources. In order to interact with these APIs, Ansible needs to authenticate with OpenStack. The shade Python library helps in authenticating with the OpenStack server. So let's go ahead and install the required dependency using the following command:

# pip install shade

How to do it...

We need to set up a few environment variables on the server that we will execute the Ansible code from. These variables will be required for authenticating with OpenStack. An easy way to do this is to download the environment variable file from the OpenStack dashboard (called Horizon).

From the Horizon dashboard, go to API Access...