Getting started

Client

Once you have installed, you’re ready to instantiate an API client to start interacting with the LXD daemon on localhost:

>>> from pylxd import Client
>>> client = Client()

If your LXD instance is listening on HTTPS, you can pass a two part tuple of (cert, key) as the cert argument.

>>> from pylxd import Client
>>> client = Client(
...     endpoint='http://10.0.0.1:8443',
...     cert=('/path/to/client.crt', '/path/to/client.key'))

Note: in the case where the certificate is self signed (LXD default), you may need to pass verify=False.

Querying LXD

LXD exposes a number of objects via its REST API that are used to orchestrate containers. Those objects are all accessed via manager attributes on the client itself. This includes certificates, containers, images, networks, operations, and profiles. Each manager has methods for querying the LXD instance. For example, to get all containers in a LXD instance

For specific manager methods, please see the documentation for each object.

pylxd Objects

Each LXD object has an analagous pylxd object. Returning to the previous client.containers.all example, a Container object is manipulated as such:

Each pylxd object has a lifecycle which includes support for transactional changes. This lifecycle includes the following methods and attributes:

  • sync() - Synchronize the object with the server. This method is called implicitly when accessing attributes that have not yet been populated, but may also be called explicitly. Why would attributes not yet be populated? When retrieving objects via all, LXD’s API does not return a full representation.
  • dirty - After setting attributes on the object, the object is considered “dirty”.
  • rollback() - Discard all local changes to the object, opting for a representation taken from the server.
  • save() - Save the object, writing changes to the server.

Returning again to the Container example

A note about asynchronous operations

Some changes to LXD will return immediately, but actually occur in the background after the http response returns. All operations that happen this way will also take an optional wait parameter that, when True, will not return until the operation is completed.