Project_O "o" command used from an instance principal

[codersteinersky]

Can the "o" command be used from an instance principal defined in a dynamic group similarly to how regular oci commands can be used? I noticed "o" works from a cloud shell host so I was hoping it worked equally well from instance principal hosts to perform selected tasks from them.

When I ran "o oci_commands" it seemed to be working but the resulting oci_commands file just has a header followed by a bunch of blank lines in it. I ran "export OCI_CLI_AUTH=instance_principal" and retried but got the same result.

Update: Copying the ocids and oci_commands from my Dev laptop to the host's ~/.oci directory seems to be working correctly w/o need for a config file I just had to set OCI_CLI_AUTH as above. Thinking it may be a viable workaround. Please let me know if there's a better way or if some changes to o's code may be needed to fully support its use from an instance principal.

"o" is a great wrapper for working with the underlying OCI commands. It makes scripting and ad hoc tasks much easier and a lot more concise. Love it!

Thanks, Jim

[kevco-us]

Apologies for my delayed response.

An empty oci_commands file probably is the result of your installed oci-cli being a bit dated. If when you run o oci_commands it says

Getting analytics commands...
Getting announce commands...
...

but doesn't show a long list of commands for each service, this means that o is having trouble parsing the oci --help output from an older oci. Try running oci --latest-version to see how current your oci is... and if oci has no --latest-version flag that's a strong indication that it's time to update. Because cli updates are frequent, it's not a bad idea to refresh your installed cli every month or two, especially if you plan to use the latest services.

After updating oci, you should rerun o oci_commands so that o has a local list of the all latest commands.

Finally, "o" works well with instance_principal authentication. Setting OCI_CLI_AUTH=instance_principal is the best way to go about this.

I'm glad you were able to work around the oci_commands file generation by copying from another source. And I'm happy to hear o is making oci easier to use!

[kevco-us]

It appears that oci <service> --help has changed recently (release 3?) to not providing the usage for all commands under that service. This breaks o's method of collecting command syntax. I'll look for an alternate, more reliable way of building the oci_commands file.

[kevco-us]

oci --help provides less command detail in some installations. o was updated (in Sept 2021) to get usage for each command individually when it is unable to get all commands in a service. This makes initial setup take longer in some cases, but allows setup to work.