OpenStack Dashboard Customization

I have installed OpenStack on my PC and I want to make some customizations. The first thing that I found is that Dashboard has a small size of the screen for the VPN. I found this solution to increase pixels for VPN:

1. Increasing VPN windows size

To increase window size we need to change html file

cd /usr/share/pyshared/horizon/dashboards/nova/templates/nova/instances_and_volumes/instances/
nano _detail_vnc.html

In this file we need to find “iframe” and change width and height.

<iframe src="" width="740" height="450"></iframe>

Done.

2. Change server alias

By default my Dashboard is accessible from http://localhost. For some reasons want to have my Dashboard on http://localhost/dashboard, here is example how to achieve it.

nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/openstack-dashboard.conf

We need to change line with WSGIScriptAlias to

WSGIScriptAlias /dashboard /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/wsgi/django.wsgi
Alias /dashboard/static /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/static/

Edit dashboard settings:

nano /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/settings.py

Change STATIC_URL to:

STATIC_URL = '/dashboard/static/'

And then reload Apache2

/etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Done.

3. SSL support

I have an architecture with Nginx→Dashboard with SSL communication.
In this case I need to enable SSL support for Dashboard, otherwise, all redirects from Dashboard will go to http proto,
instead of htttps.

The first thing that we need to do is to forward SSL proto from Nginx.
I have added two proxy headers:

proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Protocol https;
proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Ssl  on;

The second thing we need to tell to Django how to process requests.
We need to check version of the Django:

python
import django
django.VERSION
quit()

I the version is >= 1.4 then we need to modify setting.py file

nano /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/settings.py

Insert this line, that will tell to Django about proto:

SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTOCOL', 'https')

In case if we are having old version of the Djando, we need to modify middleware in Django application.

nano /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/middleware.py

Insert this class:

class ForwardedSSL(object):
    def process_request(self, request):
        if 'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SSL' in request.META:
            request.is_secure = lambda: request.META['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SSL'] == 'on'

ForwardedSSL Middleware responsible for checking “X-Forwarded-Ssl” header that we set already in Nginx.
So, for http requests it is nothing changed, but for https requests it will have is_secure = True.

Additionally we need to enable this middleware in settings.py:

nano /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/settings.py

Insert new middleware here:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'openstack_dashboard.middleware.ForwardedSSL',
    ...

Done

4. Logging support

I received the message:

[error] No handlers could be found for logger "openstack_dashboard"

I think the solution is

nano /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings.py

Insert this text to loggers:

'openstack_dashboard': {
  'handlers': ['console'],
  'propagate': False,
}

Restart apache2

/etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Done.