# Quick Placement Development

Note

This is one of many ways to achieve a simple live development environment for the placement service. This isn’t meant to be the best way, or the only way. Its purpose is more to demonstrate the steps involved, so that people can learn from those steps and choose to assemble them in whatever ways work best for them.

This content was originally written in a blog post, which perhaps explains its folksy tone.

Here are some instructions on how to spin up the placement wsgi script with uwsgi and a stubbed out `placement.conf`, in case you want to see what happens. The idea here is that you want to experiment with the current placement code, using a live database, but you’re not concerned with other services, don’t want to deal with devstack, but need a level of interaction with the code and process that something like placedock can’t provide.

As ever, even all of the above has lots of assumptions about experience and context. This document assumes you are someone who either is an OpenStack (and probably placement) developer, or would like to be one.

To make this go you need a unix-like OS, with a python3 dev environment, and git and mysql (or postgresql) installed. We’ll be doing this work from within a virtualenv, built from the `tox.ini` in the placement code.

## Get The Code

The placement code lives at https://opendev.org/openstack/placement . We want to clone that:

    git clone https://opendev.org/openstack/placement
    cd placement

## Setup The Database

We need to 1) create the database, 2) create a virtualenv to have the command, 3) use it to create the tables.

The database can have whatever name you like. Whatever you choose, use it throughout this process. We choose `placement`. You may need a user and password to talk to your database, setting that up is out of scope for this document:

    mysql -uroot -psecret -e "DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS placement;"
    mysql -uroot -psecret -e "CREATE DATABASE placement CHARACTER SET utf8;"

You may also need to set permissions:

    mysql -uroot -psecret \
        -e "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON placement.* TO 'root'@'%' identified by 'secret';"

Create a bare minimum placement.conf in the `/etc/placement` directory (which you may need to create):

    [placement_database]
    connection = mysql+pymysql://root:secret@127.0.0.1/placement?charset=utf8

Note

You may choose the location of the configuration file on the command line when using the `placement-manage` command.

Make the `placement-manage` command available by updating a virtualenv:

    tox -epy36 --notest

Run the command to create the tables:

    .tox/py36/bin/placement-manage db sync

You can confirm the tables are there with `mysqlshow placement`

## Run The Service

Now we want to run the service. We need to update `placement.conf` so it will produce debugging output and use the `noauth` strategy for authentication (so we don’t also have to run Keystone). Make `placement.conf` look like this (adjusting for your database settings):

    [DEFAULT]
    debug = True

    [placement_database]
    connection = mysql+pymysql://root:secret@127.0.0.1/placement?charset=utf8

    [api]
    auth_strategy = noauth2

We need to install the uwsgi package into the virtualenv:

    .tox/py36/bin/pip install uwsgi

And then use uwsgi to run the service. Start it with:

    .tox/py36/bin/uwsgi --http :8000 --wsgi-file .tox/py36/bin/placement-api --processes 2 --threads 10

Note

Adjust `processes` and `threads` as required. If you do not provide these arguments the server will be a single process and thus perform poorly.

If that worked you’ll see lots of debug output and `spawned uWSGI worker`. Test that things are working from another terminal with curl:

    curl -v http://localhost:8000/

Get a list of resource providers with (the `x-auth-token` header is required, `openstack-api-version` is optional but makes sure we are getting the latest functionality):

    curl -H 'x-auth-token: admin' \
         -H 'openstack-api-version: placement latest' \
         http://localhost:8000/resource_providers

The result ought to look something like this:

    {"resource_providers": []}

If it doesn’t then something went wrong with the above and there should be more information in the terminal where `uwsgi` is running.

From here you can experiment with creating resource providers and related placement features. If you change the placement code, `ctrl-c` to kill the uwsgi process and start it up again. For testing, you might enjoy placecat.

Here’s all of the above as single script. As stated above this is for illustrative purposes. You should make your own:

    #!/bin/bash

    set -xe

    # Change these as required
    CONF_DIR=/etc/placement
    DB_DRIVER=mysql+pymysql # we assume mysql throughout, feel free to change
    DB_NAME=placement
    DB_USER=root
    DB_PASS=secret

    REPO=https://opendev.org/openstack/placement

    # Create a directory for configuration to live.
    [[ -d $CONF_DIR ]] || (sudo mkdir $CONF_DIR && sudo chown $USER $CONF_DIR)

    # Establish database. Some of this may need sudo powers. Don't be shy
    # about changing the script.
    mysql -u$DB_USER -p$DB_PASS -e "DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS $DB_NAME;"
    mysql -u$DB_USER -p$DB_PASS -e "CREATE DATABASE $DB_NAME CHARACTER SET utf8;"
    mysql -u$DB_USER -p$DB_PASS -e "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON $DB_NAME.* TO '$DB_USER'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '$DB_PASS';"

    # clone the right code
    git clone $REPO
    cd placement

    # establish virtenv
    tox -epy36 --notest

    # write placement.conf
    cat<<EOF > $CONF_DIR/placement.conf
    [DEFAULT]
    debug = True

    [placement_database]
    connection = $DB_DRIVER://${DB_USER}:${DB_PASS}@127.0.0.1/${DB_NAME}?charset=utf8

    [api]
    auth_strategy = noauth2
    EOF

    # Create database tables
    .tox/py36/bin/placement-manage db sync

    # install uwsgi
    .tox/py36/bin/pip install uwsgi

    # run uwsgi
    .tox/py36/bin/uwsgi --http :8000 --wsgi-file .tox/py36/bin/placement-api --processes 2 --threads 10

this page last updated: 2026-04-01 21:43:44

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