Configure Container-backed Remote CLIs¶

The StarlingX command lines can be accessed from remote computers running Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

About this task

This functionality is made available using a docker container with pre-installed CLIs and clients. The container’s image is pulled as required by the remote CLI/client configuration scripts.

Prerequisites

You must have Docker installed on the remote systems you connect from. For more information on installing Docker, see https://docs.docker.com/install/. For Windows remote workstations, Docker is only supported on Windows 10.
Note

You must be able to run docker commands using one of the following options:
- Running the scripts using sudo
- Adding the Linux user to the docker group
For more information, see, https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/linux-postinstall/
For Windows remote workstations, you must run the following commands from a Cygwin terminal. See https://www.cygwin.com/ for more information about the Cygwin project.
For Windows remote workstations, you must also have winpty installed. Download the latest release tarball for Cygwin from https://github.com/rprichard/winpty/releases. After downloading the tarball, extract it to any location and change the Windows <PATH> variable to include its bin folder from the extracted winpty folder.
You will need a kubectl config file containing your user account and login credentials from your StarlingX administrator.

The following procedure helps you configure the Container-backed remote CLIs and clients for a non-admin user.

Procedure

Copy the remote client tarball file from a StarlingX mirror to the remote workstation, and extract its content.
- The tarball is available from the StarlingX area on a StarlingX mirror.
- You can extract the tarball contents anywhere on your client system.
```
$ cd $HOME
$ tar xvf stx-remote-clients-<version>.tgz
```
Download the user/tenant openrc file from the Horizon Web interface to the remote workstation.
1. Log in to Horizon as the user and tenant that you want to configure remote access for.
  
  In this example, we use ‘user1’ user in the ‘tenant1’ tenant.
2. Navigate to Project ‣ API Access ‣ Download Openstack RC file.
3. Select Openstack RC file.
  
  The file my-openrc.sh downloads.
Note

For a Distributed Cloud system, navigate to Project ‣ Central Cloud Regions ‣ RegionOne and download the Openstack RC file.
Copy the user-kubeconfig file received from your administrator containing your user account and credentials to the remote workstation.

You can copy the file to any location on the remote workstation. For convenience, this example assumes that it is copied to the location of the extracted tarball.

Note

Confirm that the user-kubeconfig file has 666 permissions after copying the file to the remote workstation. If necessary, use the following command to change permissions, chmod 666 user-kubeconfig.
On the remote workstation, configure the client access.
1. Change to the location of the extracted tarball.
```
$ cd $HOME/stx-remote-clients-<version>/
```
2. Create a working directory that will be mounted by the container implementing the remote CLIs.
  
  See the description of the configure_client.sh -w option below for more details.
```
$ mkdir -p $HOME/remote_cli_wd
```
3. Run the configure_client.sh script.
```
$ ./configure_client.sh -t platform -r my_openrc.sh -k user-kubeconfig -w $HOME/remote_cli_wd
```
  If you specify repositories that require authentication, as shown above, you must remember to perform a docker login to that repository before using remote CLIs for the first time.
  
  The options for configure_client.sh are:
  
  -t
  The type of client configuration. The options are platform (for StarlingX CLI and clients) and openstack (for StarlingX OpenStack application CLI and clients).
  
  The default value is platform.
  
  -r
  The user/tenant RC file to use for openstack CLI commands.
  
  The default value is admin-openrc.sh.
  
  -k
  The kubernetes configuration file to use for kubectl and helm CLI commands.
  
  The default value is temp-kubeconfig.
  
  -o
  The remote CLI/client RC file generated by this script.
  
  This RC file needs to be sourced in the shell to set up required environment variables and aliases before running any remote CLI commands.
  
  For the platform client setup, the default is remote_client_platform.sh. For the openstack application client setup, the default is remote_client_app.sh.
  -w
  The working directory that will be mounted by the container implementing the remote CLIs. When using the remote CLIs, any files passed as arguments to the remote CLI commands need to be in this directory in order for the container to access the files. The default value is the directory from which the configure_client.sh command was run.
  
  -p
  Override the container image for the platform CLI and clients.
  
  By default, the platform CLIs and clients container image is pulled from docker.io/starlingx/stx-platformclients.
  
  For example, to use the container images from the WRS AWS ECR:
```
$ ./configure_client.sh -t platform -r my-openrc.sh -k user-kubeconfig -w $HOME/remote_cli_wd -p https://hub.docker.com/layers/starlingx/stx-platformclients:stx.8.0-v1.5.9-wrs.3
```
  If you specify repositories that require authentication, you must perform a docker login to that repository before using remote CLIs.
  -a
  Override the OpenStack application image.
  
  By default, the OpenStack CLIs and clients container image is pulled from docker.io/starlingx/stx-openstackclients.
  The configure-client.sh command will generate a remote_client_platform.sh RC file. This RC file needs to be sourced in the shell to set up required environment variables and aliases before any remote CLI commands can be run.

Postrequisites

After configuring the platform’s container-backed remote CLIs/clients, the remote platform CLIs can be used in any shell after sourcing the generated remote CLI/client RC file. This RC file sets up the required environment variables and aliases for the remote CLI commands.

Note

Consider adding this command to your .login or shell rc file, such that your shells will automatically be initialized with the environment variables and aliases for the remote CLI commands.

See Using Container-backed Remote CLIs and Clients for details.