sahara-image-pack

The CLI command sahara-image-pack operates in-place on an existing image and installs and configures the software required for the plugin.

The script sahara-image-pack takes the following primary arguments:

--config-file PATH    Path to a config file to use. Multiple config files
                      can be specified, with values in later files taking
                      precedence. Defaults to None.
--image IMAGE         The path to an image to modify. This image will be
                      modified in-place: be sure to target a copy if you
                      wish to maintain a clean master image.
--root-filesystem ROOT_FS
                      The filesystem to mount as the root volume on the
                      image. Novalue is required if only one filesystem is
                      detected.
--test-only           If this flag is set, no changes will be made to the
                      image; instead, the script will fail if discrepancies
                      are found between the image and the intended state.

After these arguments, the script takes PLUGIN and VERSION arguments. These arguments will allow any plugin and version combination which supports the image packing feature. Plugins may require their own arguments at specific versions; use the --help feature with PLUGIN and VERSION to see the appropriate argument structure.

a plausible command-line invocation would be:

sahara-image-pack --image CentOS.qcow2 \
    --config-file etc/sahara/sahara.conf \
    cdh 5.7.0 [cdh 5.7.0 specific arguments, if any]

This script will modify the target image in-place. Please copy your image if you want a backup or if you wish to create multiple images from a single base image.

This CLI will automatically populate the set of available plugins and versions from the plugin set loaded in Sahara, and will show any plugin for which the image packing feature is available. The next sections of this guide will first describe how to modify an image packing specification for one of the plugins, and second, how to enable the image packing feature for new or existing plugins.

Note: In case of a RHEL 7 images, it is necessary to register the image before starting to pack it, also enable some required repos.

virt-customize -v -a $SAHARA_RHEL_IMAGE --sm-register \
    --sm-credentials ${REG_USER}:password:${REG_PASSWORD} --sm-attach \
    pool:${REG_POOL_ID} --run-command 'subscription-manager repos \
    --disable=* --enable=$REPO_A \ --enable=$REPO_B \ --enable=$REPO_C'

Installation and developer notes

The script is part of of the Sahara repository, but it does not depend on the Sahara services. In order to use its development version, clone the Sahara repository, check out the branch which matches the Sahara version used, and install the repository in a virtualenv.

The script is also provided by binary distributions of OpenStack. For example, RDO ships it in the openstack-sahara-image-pack package.

The script depends on a python library which is not packaged in pip, but is available through yum, dnf, and apt. If you have installed Sahara through yum, dnf, or apt, you should have appropriate dependencies, but if you wish to use the script but are working with Sahara from source, run whichever of the following is appropriate to your OS:

sudo yum install libguestfs python-libguestfs libguestfs-tools
sudo dnf install libguestfs python-libguestfs libguestfs-tools
sudo apt-get install libguestfs python-guestfs libguestfs-tools

If you are using tox to create virtual environments for your Sahara work, please use the images environment to run sahara-image-pack. This environment is configured to use system site packages, and will thus be able to find its dependency on python-libguestfs.