[Maas-devel] Allow API to use <system_id | hostname> for all operations that currently require the system_id

[Jeroen Vermeulen]

On 2014-05-29 14:46, Raphaël Badin wrote:

> I wonder if, instead of changing the core *behaviour* by adding the
> option to look up the nodes using hostnames, we shouldn't improve the
> CLI so that it's easier to *extract* information from the returned
> responses.  This is based on the idea that most of the pain we feel when
> using the CLI comes from the awkwardness of having to deal with
> JSON-formatted output.  While this is fine when using the API in Python,
> JSON is clumsy to use on the command-line (even though I know that they
> are workarounds, for instance by piping the JSON blob into a Python
> command).

We may be getting into different problems here...  I agree that 
extracting fields from results is probably a client-side job by nature.

For short-term pain relief, by the way, a command called ‘jq’ makes this 
easy.  Here's how you get just the system_id for a node with hostname foo:

     maas myprof nodes list hostname=foo | jq '.[0].system_id'


Jeroen