I usually like to use python to script my day to day tests against Katello (you may have seen some of my previous posts about using the Katello CLI for the same purpose) and I figured I’d start showing some basic examples for anyone else out there who may be interested.

Assuming you have already installed and configured your Katello instance (learn how to do this here) with the default configurations, we now have a few options to proceed:

1. write and run your scripts in the same environment as your server
2. install the katello-cli package (pip install katello-cli)
3. Use git to clone the katello-cli repository (git clone https://github.com/Katello/katello-cli.git) and make sure to include it into your PYTHONPATH.

Option 1 is by far the easiest approach since you should have all the dependencies (namely kerberos and M2Crypto) already installed, but I like Option 3 as it allows me to always have the latest code to play with.

Now we’re ready to write some code! The first thing we’ll do is import some of the Katello modules:

 from katello.client import server  from katello.client.server import BasicAuthentication  from katello.client.api.organization import OrganizationAPI  from katello.client.api.system_group import SystemGroupAPI

Next, we establish a connection to the Katello server (qetello01.example.com in my case), using the default credentials of admin/admin:

> katello_server = server.KatelloServer(host='qetello01.example.com',
> path_prefix='/katello/', port=443)
> katello_server.set_auth_method(BasicAuthentication(username='admin',
> password='admin')) server.set_active_server(katello_server)

Let’s now instantiate the Organization API object and use it to fetch the “ACME_Corporation” that gets automatically created for a default installation:

> organization_api = OrganizationAPI()
>
> org = organization_api.organization(\'ACME_Corporation\') print org
> {u'apply_info_task_id': None, u'created_at': u'2013-09-12T20:15:06Z',
> u'default_info': {u'distributor': \[\], u'system': \[\]},
> u'deletion_task_id': None, u'description': u'ACME_Corporation
> Organization', u'id': 1, u'label': u'ACME_Corporation', u'name':
> u'ACME_Corporation', u'owner_auto_attach_all_systems_task_id': None,
> u'service_level': None, u'service_levels': \[\], u'updated_at':
> u'2013-09-12T20:15:06Z'}

Lastly, let’s create a brand new organization:

> new_org = organization_api.create(name=\'New Org\', label=\'new-org\',
> description=\'Created via API\') print new_org {u'apply_info_task_id':
> None, u'created_at': u'2013-09-12T21:48:55Z', u'default_info':
> {u'distributor': \[\], u'system': \[\]}, u'deletion_task_id': None,
> u'description': u'Created via API', u'id': 283, u'label': u'new-org',
> u'name': u'New Org', u'owner_auto_attach_all_systems_task_id': None,
> u'service_level': None, u'service_levels': \[\], u'updated_at':
> u'2013-09-12T21:48:55Z'}

As you can see, it is pretty straight forward to use python to create some useful scripts to drive a Katello server, whether you want to populate it with a pre-defined set of data (e.g. default users, roles, permissions, organizations, content, etc) or to test core functionality as I do with Mangonel, my pet project.

Here’s a Gist of the code mentioned in this post, and let me know if this was useful to you.