Quick Start Guide

Synopsis

This page contains step-by-step guide of installing Perspective environment. We assume that you're using any latest deb-based operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian.

Using Docker container

To quickly taste what Perspective is you can start one of Docker containers having all required stuff installed inside. Please refer to the following link for more details. To install packages manually read next paragraphs of this page.

Installing packages

1. Add Perspective PPA to get packages available on your system:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:meridor/perspective
$ sudo apt-get update

2. Install server-side packages:

$ sudo apt-get install perspective-storage perspective-openstack perspective-rest

In this guide we install worker for Openstack cloud but you may want to install another one - just use respective name instead of perspective-openstack.

3. Install Perspective shell (client application):

$ sudo apt-get install perspective-shell

Configuring services

4. Notice new folders that were created during package installation:

• /etc/perspective - contains configuration files for installed services
• /var/log/perspective - contains log files for installed services

5. Normally the following services should be started during installation: perspective-storage, perspective-openstack and perspective-rest. If that's not the case then start them manually:

$ sudo service perspective-storage start
$ sudo service perspective-rest start
$ sudo service perspective-openstack start

Notice: perspective-storage service should be always started the first and stopped the last because REST and Openstack daemons require it to start properly.

6. Specify one or multiple Openstack credentials in /etc/perspective/openstack/clouds.xml file:

$ cat /etc/perspective/openstack/clouds.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<clouds xmlns="urn:config.perspective.meridor.org">
    <cloud>
        <id>cloud1</id>
        <name>cloud-one</name>
        <endpoint>https://identity.example.com/v2.0</endpoint>
        <identity>project_name:username</identity>
        <credential>password</credential>
        <enabled>true</enabled>
    </cloud>
    <cloud>
        <id>cloud2</id>
        <name>cloud-two</name>
        <endpoint>https://identity.test.com/v2.0</endpoint>
        <identity>another_project:user</identity>
        <credential>my_password123</credential>
        <enabled>true</enabled>
    </cloud>
</clouds>

Don't forget to restart perspective-openstack daemon after doing changes.

Launch shell

7. Type the following command to launch shell application:

$ perspective

During the first launch ~/.perspective folder containing shell per-user configuration should appear.

8. Perspective shell behavior conforms to the standard Unix shell behavior. E.g. you can type Ctrl+D to exit, Ctrl+L to clear the screen or Tab for auto-complete.