View source for API Main Practical

{{Author|Cyril Rohr}}
{{Maintainer|Cyril Rohr}}
{{Status|Draft}}
{{Pages|API}}
{{Portal|User}}

== Presentation ==
This practical will show you how to interact with the [https://api.grid5000.fr/ Grid'5000 API], using a range of tools that goes in increasing degrees of abstraction.

This practical is targeted at people who want to '''remotely''' and '''programmatically''' (i.e. without Human interaction) access the Grid'5000 tools to monitor nodes, submit jobs and deploy environments.

If you are not familiar with the HTTP protocol, you are '''strongly''' advised to have a look at the [[API|introductory page]] about the Grid'5000 API.

This practical will use the latest stable version of the API: <code>2.1</code>.

== Prerequisites ==
The following examples will use the [http://man.cx/curl cURL] tool, which is the swiss-army knife for interacting (among other things) with '''HTTP''' APIs. On debian systems, it can be installed with:

  sudo apt-get install curl

The advanced examples will all use the [http://ruby-lang.org/ Ruby] language (a cousin to the Python language), and the Ruby package manager [http://rubygems.org/ Rubygems]. On a debian system, they can be installed with:

  sudo apt-get install ruby libopenssl-ruby rubygems

Note that if <code>gem -v</code> returns a version number lower than <code>1.3.5</code>, you may need to [http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/3 install rubygems from sources] to get a more recent version.

{{Warning|text=If you are installing ruby gems as a non-privileged user, you may encounter a warning similar to the following:

<pre class="brush: plain">
  WARNING:  Installing to ~/.gem since /var/lib/gems/1.9.1 and
  	  /var/lib/gems/1.9.1/bin aren't both writable.
  WARNING:  You don't have /users1/g5k-30/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/bin in your PATH,
  	  gem executables will not run.
</pre>

In this case, do not forget to add the specified directory to your PATH, so that binaries are easily accessible:
<pre class="brush: bash">
  echo "export PATH=\"$HOME/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/bin:\$PATH\"" >> ~/.profile && source ~/.profile
</pre>
}}

== Tutorials ==
The tutorials are self-hosted in a [http://github.com/grid5000/tutorials git repository] at GitHub, so that you can easily get a copy (either by cloning the repository or downloading an archive of the files) and make changes to the source files.

Go to http://grid5000.github.io/tutorials/ to start the tutorials.

== Resources ==
Do not hesitate to ask for help in the devel mailing-list, and share your code!
* [[Mailing lists]] - The place to ask for help or share code and findings.
* [[API]] - The API introductory page.
* https://api.grid5000.fr - The API entry point.