Developer’s Guide

Getting Started

If you are new to ironic, this section contains information that should help you get started as a developer working on the project or contributing to the project.

This guide assumes you have read the OpenDev getting started documentation. It will also be helpful to be familiar with OpenStack contributors documentation, which contains basic information about how to use many of the community tools and OpenStack practices.

Basics

Basic information about setting up development environments with devstack or bifrost, or getting unit tests running can be found in our Developer Quick-Start.

Bugs

Information about how ironic projects handle bugs can be found below.

Community & Policies

The following pages describe the architecture of the Bare Metal service and may be helpful to anyone working on or with the service, but are written primarily for developers.

These pages contain information for PTLs, cross-project liaisons, and core reviewers.

Writing Drivers

Ironic’s community includes many hardware vendors who contribute drivers that enable more advanced functionality when Ironic is used in conjunction with that hardware. To do this, the Ironic developer community is committed to standardizing on a Python Driver API that meets the common needs of all hardware vendors, and evolving this API without breaking backwards compatibility. However, it is sometimes necessary for driver authors to implement functionality - and expose it through the REST API - that can not be done through any existing API.

To facilitate that, we also provide the means for API calls to be “passed through” ironic and directly to the driver. Some guidelines on how to implement this are provided below. Driver authors are strongly encouraged to talk with the developer community about any implementation using this functionality.

Full Ironic Server Python API Reference

Understanding the Ironic’s CI

It’s important to understand the role of each job in the CI, how to add new jobs and how to debug failures that may arise. To facilitate that, we have created the documentation below.