Ironic
======

Ironic is an Incubated OpenStack project which aims to provision
bare metal machines instead of virtual machines, forked from the
Nova Baremetal driver.

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Project Resources
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Project status, bugs, and blueprints are tracked on Launchpad:

  http://launchpad.net/ironic

Additional resources are linked from the project wiki page:

  https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic

Developers wishing to contribute to an OpenStack project should
find plenty of helpful resources here:

  https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Getting_Started

All OpenStack projects use Gerrit for code reviews.
A good reference for that is here:

  https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GerritWorkflow

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Project Architecture
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An Ironic deployment will be composed of the following components:

- A **RESTful API** service, by which operators and other services
  may interact with the managed bare metal servers.
- A **Manager** service, which does the bulk of the work. Functionality
  is exposed via the API service.
  The Manager and API services communicate via RPC.
- An internal **driver API** for different Manager functions.
  There are currently two driver types: BMCDriver and DeploymentDriver.
- Internal drivers for each function are dynamically loaded, according to the
  specific hardware being managed, such that heterogeneous hardware deployments
  can be managed by a single Manager service.
- One or more **Deployment Agents**, which provide local control over
  the hardware which is not available remotely to the Manager.
  A ramdisk should be built which contains one of these agents, eg. with
  https://github.com/stackforge/diskimage-builder, and this ramdisk can be
  booted on-demand. The agent is never run inside a tenant instance.
- A **Database** and a DB API for storing persistent state of the Manager and Drivers.

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Development
-----------

Ironic source code should be pulled directly from git::

  git clone https://github.com/openstack/ironic

Setting up a local environment for development can be done with tox::

    cd <your_src_dir>/ironic

    # install prerequisites
    * Ubuntu/Debian:
    sudo apt-get install python-dev swig libssl-dev python-pip libmysqlclient-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev
    * Fedora/RHEL:
    sudo yum install python-devel swig openssl-devel python-pip mysql-libs libxml2-devel libxslt-devel

    sudo easy_install nose
    sudo pip install virtualenv setuptools-git flake8

    # create virtualenv
    tox -evenv -- echo 'done'

    # activate the virtualenv
    source .tox/venv/bin/activate

    # run pep8/flake8 checks
    flake8

    # run unit tests
    testr run

    # deactivate the virtualenv
    deactivate