Installing Horizon – web user interface dashboard

Horizon dashboard service is the web user interface for users to consume OpenStack services and for administrator to manage and operate OpenStack.

Getting ready

Install packages needed for Horizon as follows:

[root@controller ~]# yum install mod_wsgi openstack-dashboard
Use firewall-cmd command to open port 80:
[root@controller ~]# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=80/tcp
[root@controller ~]# firewall-cmd --reload
Configure SELinux:
# setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect on

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to configure and enable the Horizon dashboard service:

1. Edit /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings:

   ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['localhost', '*']
   OPENSTACK_HOST = "controller"
   

2. Start and enable service. At this point, we can start and enable Neutron-server service:

   [root@controller ~]# systemctl start httpd
   [root@controller ~]# systemctl enable httpd
   

How it works...

Horizon is a Django-based web application, running on Apache HTTPD service, it interacts with all services' APIs to gather information from OpenStack's services and to create new resources.

There's more...

We can verify whether Horizon dashboard service was installed successfully after we completed configuring the service.

Verify successful installation

You can now access the dashboard via web browser at http://controller/dashb using the admin user account and password chosen during the admin account creation.