Installing devstack (Openstack for developers) on Ubuntu 14.04

Step 1: Install git

 sudo apt-get install git 

Step 2: Clone the latest devstack repository (Grizzly, Icehouse, Juno, Kilo, etc …)
For Icehouse

 git clone -b stable/icehouse https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git 

or, for Grizzly

 git clone -b stable/grizzly https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git 

A folder in your home directory with the name devstack should have been created

Step 3: Change directory to the devstack directory

cd /devstack/userDir/devstack

Step 4: Install devstack using the stack.sh installation script

./stack.sh

You will first be presented with at least 5 dialogs asking for passwords for various services. The norm is to use the same password – for easy use while doing development and testing(Great security, right? not really, but it’s for convenience – i.e “Principle of Psychological acceptability”). Read the dialogs carefully and if you chose to put in more secure passwords (longer than 8 characters, alphanumeric, special characters) perhaps note them down somewhere – it may save you a great big headache later.

After these dialogs, the script will run and download stuff from the internet to install (Make sure your internet connection is working). The script runs for at least 20min, if it goes through the entire procedure and works.

At the end of the installation script (which may take at least 20min, so get a coffee, or do something else) you will be presented with the URL where the Openstack dashboard (horizon) can be found, as well as the username and password to log into the dashboard. The default usernames are “admin” and “demo”. The password will be what you set among the dialogs at the beginning, or if you just pressed enter to skip the dialogs, then devstack will choose a random long password for you (which it will show you at this point)

Generally if something went wrong and you want to stop the devstack platform as a whole, i.e. stopping all the services running you can use:

./unstack.sh

If you want to remove everything (well almost everything) that devstack installed on the machine:

./clean.sh

(NB: i’ve had varying success in ensuring that it removes everything. Sometimes you might have to run extra commands like apt-get remove –purge , apt-get autoremove and/or apt-get autoclean among others in order to clean out the devstack installation)