Hey, so from time to time we have customers who ask us about how they can tag their servers, this might be for automation or for means of organising their servers. Whilst it’s not possible to tag servers thru the API in such a way that it shows the ‘tag’ in the UI, that you can add in the mycloud control panel. You can instead use the cloud server meta-data set command, it’s easy enough. Here is how I achieved it.

set-meta-data.sh

#!/bin/bash

USERNAME='mycloudusername'
APIKEY='mycloudapikey'
# Tenant ID (account number is the number shown in the URL address when logged into Rackspace control panel)
ACCOUNT_NUMBER=1001010
API_ENDPOINT="https://lon.servers.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2/$ACCOUNT_NUMBER"
SERVER_ID='e9036384-c9be-4c8c-8551-c2f269c424bc'

# This just grabs from a large JSON output the AUTH TOKEN for the API. We auth with the apikey, and we get the auth token and set it in this variable 'TOKEN'
TOKEN=`curl https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/tokens -X POST -d '{ "auth":{"RAX-KSKEY:apiKeyCredentials": { "username":"'$USERNAME'", "apiKey": "'$APIKEY'" }} }' -H "Content-type: application/json" |  python -mjson.tool | grep -A5 token | grep id | cut -d '"' -f4`


# Then we re-use the $TOKEN we retrieved for the call to the API, supply the $ACCOUNT_NUMBER and importantly, the $API_ENDPOINT.
# Also we sent a file, metadata.json that contains the meta-data we want to add to the server.
curl -s -v  \
-H "X-Auth-Token: $TOKEN"  \
-H "X-Project-Id: $ACCOUNT_NUMBER" \
-H "Accept: application/json"  \
-X PUT -d @metadata.json -H "content-type: application/json" "$API_ENDPOINT/servers/$SERVER_ID/metadata" | python -mjson.tool

metadata.json

{
    "metadata": {
        "Label" : "MyServer",
        "Version" : "v1.0.1-2"
    }
}

chmod +x set-meta-data.sh
./set-meta-data.sh

OK , so now you’ve set the data.

What about retrieving it you ask? That’s not too difficult. Just remove the PUT and replace it with a GET, and take away the -d @metadata.json bit, and we’re off, like so:

get-meta-data.sh

#!/bin/bash

USERNAME='mycloudusername'
APIKEY='mycloudapikey'
ACCOUNT_NUMBER=1001010
API_ENDPOINT="https://lon.servers.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2/$ACCOUNT_NUMBER"
SERVER_ID='c2036384-c9be-4c8c-8551-c2f269c4249r'


TOKEN=`curl https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/tokens -X POST -d '{ "auth":{"RAX-KSKEY:apiKeyCredentials": { "username":"'$USERNAME'", "apiKey": "'$APIKEY'" }} }' -H "Content-type: application/json" |  python -mjson.tool | grep -A5 token | grep id | cut -d '"' -f4`



curl -s -v  \
-H "X-Auth-Token: $TOKEN"  \
-H "X-Project-Id: $ACCOUNT_NUMBER" \
-H "Accept: application/json"  \
-X GET "$API_ENDPOINT/servers/$SERVER_ID/metadata" | python -mjson.tool

simples! and as the fonz would say ‘Hey, grades are not cool, learning is cool. ‘

chmod +x get-meta-data.sh
./get-meta-data.sh