Configuring Services to work with Keystone

Once Keystone is installed and running (see Configuring Keystone), services need to be configured to work with it. To do this, we primarily install and configure middleware for the OpenStack service to handle authentication tasks or otherwise interact with Keystone.

In general:

• Clients making calls to the service will pass in an authentication token.
• The Keystone middleware will look for and validate that token, taking the appropriate action.
• It will also retrieve additional information from the token such as user name, user id, project name, project id, roles, etc...

The middleware will pass those data down to the service as headers. More details on the architecture of that setup is described in the authentication middleware documentation.

Setting up credentials

Admin Token

For a default installation of Keystone, before you can use the REST API, you need to define an authorization token. This is configured in keystone.conf file under the section [DEFAULT]. In the sample file provided with the Keystone project, the line defining this token is:

[DEFAULT]
admin_token = ADMIN

A “shared secret” that can be used to bootstrap Keystone. This token does not represent a user, and carries no explicit authorization. To disable in production (highly recommended), remove AdminTokenAuthMiddleware from your paste application pipelines (for example, in keystone-paste.ini)

Setting up projects, users, and roles

You need to minimally define a project, user, and role to link the project and user as the most basic set of details to get other services authenticating and authorizing with Keystone.

You will also want to create service users for nova, glance, swift, etc. to be able to use to authenticate users against Keystone. The auth_token middleware supports using either the shared secret described above as admin_token or users for each service.

See Configuring Keystone for a walk through on how to create projects, users, and roles.

Setting up services

Creating Service Users

To configure the OpenStack services with service users, we need to create a project for all the services, and then users for each of the services. We then assign those service users an admin role on the service project. This allows them to validate tokens - and to authenticate and authorize other user requests.

Create a project for the services, typically named service (however, the name can be whatever you choose):

$ openstack project create service

Create service users for nova, glance, swift, and neutron (or whatever subset is relevant to your deployment):

$ openstack user create nova --password Sekr3tPass --project service

Repeat this for each service you want to enable.

Create an administrative role for the service accounts, typically named admin (however the name can be whatever you choose). For adding the administrative role to the service accounts, you’ll need to know the name of the role you want to add. If you don’t have it handy, you can look it up quickly with:

$ openstack role list

Once you have it, grant the administrative role to the service users. This is all assuming that you’ve already created the basic roles and settings as described in Configuring Keystone:

$ openstack role add admin --project service --user nova

Defining Services

Keystone also acts as a service catalog to let other OpenStack systems know where relevant API endpoints exist for OpenStack Services. The OpenStack Dashboard, in particular, uses this heavily - and this must be configured for the OpenStack Dashboard to properly function.

The endpoints for these services are defined in a template, an example of which is in the project as the file etc/default_catalog.templates.

Keystone supports two means of defining the services, one is the catalog template, as described above - in which case everything is detailed in that template.

The other is a SQL backend for the catalog service, in which case after Keystone is online, you need to add the services to the catalog:

$ openstack service create compute --name nova \
                                --description "Nova Compute Service"
$ openstack service create ec2 --name ec2 \
                               --description "EC2 Compatibility Layer"
$ openstack service create image --name glance \
                                  --description "Glance Image Service"
$ openstack service create identity --name keystone \
                                    --description "Keystone Identity Service"
$ openstack service create object-store --name swift \
                                 --description "Swift Service"

Setting Up Auth-Token Middleware

The Keystone project provides the auth-token middleware which validates that the request is valid before passing it on to the application. This must be installed and configured in the applications (such as Nova, Glance, Swift, etc.). The authentication middleware documentation describes how to install and configure this middleware.