[PVE-User] Extracting/leveraging the JSON schema

[Fabian Grünbichler]

> Erik Hollensbe <erik at hollensbe.org> hat am 16.12.2020 10:48 geschrieben:
> I'd like to extract the JSON schema for use in generating a golang API.
> Judging from brief googling I've seen others have attempted this but I was
> hoping to make an effective dent in the problem. I think it'd be really
> useful in terraform and other orchestration tools that are typically
> written in that language (these days at least).
> 
> I reviewed the pve-common packages, specifically, the PVE::JSONSchema perl
> module and it looks like a parser but not the actual API.

yes, pve-common contains the basic framework, the API itself is distributed over the other packages (mainly pve-storage, pve-container, qemu-server, and the main API daemons and entrypoint in pve-manager).

> Best I can tell from googling and looking at the files in /usr/share/pve is
> that there is a api.js (I forget the exact filename) that contains what I
> seek, unfortunately it is coupled with some additional framework code to
> generate it all, best I can tell?

apidata.js is generated by the following (veeeeery short ;)) perl script:

https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-docs.git;a=blob;f=extractapi.pl;h=06d6af4cb2cabe8bbdf514ed03046879bf53c15b;hb=HEAD

it pulls in the main API endpoint (PVE::API2) and the API handler (PVE::RESTHandler). the latter already has all the dumping functionality built-in. it should run on any host that has PVE installed.

> What I'd really like to do is get ya'll up to speed so that your API can be
> consumed by codegen tools that are out there. Let me know how I can help
> and facilitate this. Swagger would be a bold idea/ideal here, if you're up
> for considering something along those lines as well. The swagger/openapi
> codegen tools are dull but effective for a lot of languages.

there have been some efforts like that in the past (mostly from the nodejs camp AFAICT). maybe take a look at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_VE_API#Clients and see what other people have done so far ;)
 
> The PVE API is vast and I don't see the feasibility in porting it by hand
> 100%, especially when you consider future maintenance burdens, so something
> that could generate code or dynamically configure a client would be an
> ideal solution assuming it is needed and can be bootstrapped.
> 
> Thanks and I hope this message from a brand new ML user is not too forward
> :)

good luck with your project! don't hesitate to ask if you have further questions (although if they get more technical, I'd suggest switching to pve-devel instead of pve-user :))