API

We provide ready-made scripts to let you control your cloud computing platform infrastructure without writing any code.

Linux/Unix and Windows Cygwin users should download our simple command line tool, drive upload tool and drive download tool.

Once you have these scripts, in just two commands, you can upload a drive image and boot a server. See below for the full input and output to do exactly this.

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Each command corresponds to a single API HTTP GET or POST, with the URL corresponding to the command-line arguments, and the input and output data exactly as seen on the command line here.

1. Set API end-point for your availability zone

Substitute api-lon-b.elastichosts.com if your account is there. Alternatively, you can hard-code the value of EHURI in your local copy of the scripts.

      $ export EHURI=https://api-lon-p.elastichosts.com/

2. Set authentication credentials (from account profile)

Omit the secret key if you are running on a very old Unix system that leaks the content of your environment to other users via ps e. You will then be interactively prompted for your secret key by curl. Alternatively, you can hard-code the value of EHAUTH in your local copy of the scripts, but make sure they aren’t world-readable!

      $ export EHAUTH=<user uuid>:<secret API key>

3. Create drive and upload image

We use the drive upload tool to automatically upload in gzipped chunks.

      $ elastichosts-upload image.raw
      Created drive 08c92dd5-70a0-4f51-83d2-835919d254df of size 10000000
      Uploading 2 chunks of 5242880 bytes: .. completed

NOTE: for reference, a more basic upload with the raw API would be:

      $ elastichosts -c drives create << EOF | grep drive
      $ > name TestDrive
      $ > size 10000000
      $ > EOF
      $ drive 08c92dd5-70a0-4f51-83d2-835919d254df
      $ elastichosts -f image.raw drives 08c92dd5-70a0-4f51-83d2-835919d254df write

4. Boot a server from the drive

Boot a server from the drive, with 2000 core MHz and 1024 MB RAM.

      $ elastichosts -c servers create << EOF
      > name TestServer
      > cpu 2000
      > mem 1024
      > ide:0:0 08c92dd5-70a0-4f51-83d2-835919d254df
      > boot ide:0:0
      > nic:0:model e1000
      > nic:0:dhcp auto
      > smp auto
      > vnc auto
      > vnc:password XXXXXXXX
      > EOF
      server 85ef58c8-6f5d-4f7f-8f1c-0c19d45d7c1c
      name TestServer
      cpu 2000
      smp auto
      smp:cores 1
      smp:sockets 1
      mem 1024
      ide:0:0 08c92dd5-70a0-4f51-83d2-835919d254df
      boot ide:0:0
      nic:0:dhcp auto
      nic:0:dhcp:ip 91.203.56.132
      nic:0:model e1000
      rx 0
      tx 0
      vnc auto
      vnc:ip 91.203.56.132
      vnc:password XXXXXXXX

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The API is implemented in a ReST style, using the URL to specify an object and an action, HTTP GET to read state and HTTP POST to change state. In the description below, API URLs are relative to the stem https://api-lon-p.elastichosts.com/ where api-lon-p refers to the availability zone for our Peer 1 availability zone near London in the UK.

Users, drives and servers are identified by UUIDs, which are assigned by our infrastructure and passed as a string in the format XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX.

Authentication

API calls must use HTTP Basic Authentication, specifying the user’s UUID as the username and their secret API key as the password. Both are available from the user’s account profile.

Data formats

The API can be used in either text/plain(default) or application/json modes. You should specify the type of input data with an HTTP Content-Type: header, and request a type for output with an HTTP Accept: header. text/plain is the default if no headers are set.

The API sends or receives one of three types of data, according to the call:

name TestServer
cpu 4000
mem 2048

{"name":"TestServer", "cpu":4000, "mem":2048}

ip 192.168.0.1
ip 192.168.0.2
ip 192.168.0.3

 [{"type":"ip", "resource":"192.168.0.1"},
  {"type":"ip", "resource":"192.168.0.2"},
  {"type":"ip", "resource":"192.168.0.3"}]

name TestServer1
cpu 2000
mem 1024
name TestServer2
cpu 4000
mem 2048

 [{"name":"TestServer1", "cpu":2000, "mem":1024},
  {"name":"TestServer2", "cpu":4000, "mem":2048}]

Errors

Errors are returned with an appropriate HTTP status code, an X-Elastic-Error header specifying the error type, and a text description in the HTTP body. The error types are:

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