How to use Curl Calling BOSH API

Products

• VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs

Issue/Introduction

BOSH CLI commands can be used to perform system administration tasks. Besides this approach, you could also use API endpoints provided by the Director to do the same tasks. This article shows you how to use curl calling BOSH API.

Environment

Resolution

The Director can be configured in two authentication modes: Basic Authentication and UAA. All of the supported versions of Pivotal Cloud Foundry use UAA so we could use "uaac curl" to calling BOSH API with authentication.

1. Set UAAC target to the BOSH Director

ubuntu@pivotal-ops-manager:~$ uaac target https://192.168.6.67:8443

Target: https://192.168.6.67:8443

Context: readonly, from client readonly

2. Fetch the access token

ubuntu@pivotal-ops-manager:~$ uaac token client get readonly
Client secret: ********

Successfully fetched token via client credentials grant.
Target: https://192.168.6.67:8443
Context: readonly, from client readonly

3. Now you can use the following command to query an endpoint

uaac curl -k https://<ops-manager-ip>:25555/<endpoint>

Here is an example, the query endpoint is /deployments/{name of deployment}/instances to list all the instances which is equivalent to "bosh instances" CLI command.

ubuntu@pivotal-ops-manager:~$ uaac curl -k https://192.168.6.67:25555/deployments/cf-58b8343a51794e7628ce/instances|grep -A100 "RESPONSE BODY"|grep -v "RESPONSE BODY"|jq .
[
  {
    "id": "8453b9f0-c2b4-4864-ae47-e61a14841579",
    "index": 0,
    "job": "diego_cell-partition-75437f0a091c320d8ca4",
    "cid": "vm-09b407fb-e478-4eda-81ac-9b37bf113c99",
    "agent_id": "376adc2c-d63d-4689-8f60-95edfbda6ed0"
  },
...
  {
    "id": "7ac9a5ea-4f4d-4533-8581-cfb31ee32aca",
    "index": 0,
    "job": "mysql_monitor-partition-75437f0a091c320d8ca4",
    "cid": "vm-914b5e7a-a4b6-4e44-a5a4-906a693d7071",
    "agent_id": "c12c86ce-5e1c-41f8-8a06-310ea908e065"
  }
]

Additional Information

In step 2, for more information on the read-only client, please refer to How to add a Read-Only BOSH user.

In step 3, for more information on the whole API endpoints provided by the Director, please see Director API v1.