A month ago, a mail hit the OpenStack mailing list entitled "The OpenStack Community Welcomes Developers in All Programming Languages". You may know that OpenStack is essentially built using Python, and therefore it is the reference language for the client libraries implementations. As a Lisp and OpenStack practitioner, I used this excuse to build a challenge for myself: let's prove this point by bringing Lisp into OpenStack!

Welcome cl-openstack-client, the OpenStack client library for Common Lisp!

The project is hosted on the classic OpenStack infrastructure for third party project, StackForge. It provides the continuous integration system based on Jenkins and the Gerrit infrastructure used to review contributions.

How the tests works

OpenStack projects ran a fabulous contribution workflow, which I already talked about, based on tools like Gerrit and Jenkins.

OpenStack Python projects are used to run tox, to build a virtual environment and run test inside. We don't have such thing in Common Lisp as far as I know, so I had to build it myself.

Fortunately, using Quicklisp, the fabulous equivalent of Python's PyPI, it has been a breeze to set this up. cl-openstack-client just includes a basic shell script that does the following:

• Download quicklisp.lisp
• Run a Lisp program to install the dependencies using Quicklisp
• Run a Lisp program running the test suite using FiveAM, that exit with 0 or 1 based on the tests results.

I just run the test using SBCL, though adding more compiler on the table would be a really good plan in the future, and should be straightforward. You can admire a log from a successful test run done when I proposed a patch via Gerrit, to check what it looks like.

Implementation status

For the curious, here's an example of how it works:

* (require 'cl-openstack-client)
* (use-package 'cl-keystone-client)
* (defvar k (make-instance 'connection-v2 :username "demo" :password "somepassword" :tenant-name "demo" :url "http://devstack:5000"))

K

* (authenticate k)

((:ISSUED--AT . "2013-07-04T05:59:55.454226")
 (:EXPIRES . "2013-07-05T05:59:55Z")
 (:ID
  . "wNFQwNzo1OTo1NS40NTQyMthisisaverylongtokenwNFQwNzo1OTo1NS40NTQyM")
 (:TENANT (:DESCRIPTION) (:ENABLED . T)
  (:ID . "1774fd545df4400380eb2b4f4985b3be") (:NAME . "demo")))

* (connection-token-id k)

"wNFQwNzo1OTo1NS40NTQyMthisisaverylongtokenwNFQwNzo1OTo1NS40NTQyM"

Unfortunately, the implementation is far from being complete. It only implements for now the Keystone token retrieval.

I've actually started this project to build an already working starting point. With this, future potential contributors will be able to spend efforts on writing code, and not on setting up the basic continuous integration system or module infrastructure.

If you wish to help me and contribute, just follow the OpenStack Gerrit workflow howto or feel free to come by me and ask any question (I'm hanging out on #lisp on Freenode too).

See you soon, hopping to bring more Lisp into OpenStack!