Oslo Utility library

10.0.1 · active · verified Sat Apr 11

The oslo.utils library provides support for common utility functions such as encoding, exception handling, string manipulation, and time handling. It is an integral part of the OpenStack ecosystem. The current stable version is 10.0.1, with releases typically tied to the OpenStack development cycles.

Warnings

breaking Dropped Python 2.x support in major versions. `oslo.utils` versions 10.x and later explicitly require Python 3.10 or newer. Older codebases running on Python 2 will need to be migrated to Python 3.
Fix: Upgrade your Python environment to 3.10+ and ensure all dependencies are compatible. Review and update any Python 2 specific code patterns.
gotcha Other libraries or OpenStack components might have implicit runtime dependencies on `oslo.utils` submodules. For example, `keystoneauth1` previously had an issue where it would fail without `oslo.utils` being explicitly installed, despite not declaring it as a direct dependency.
Fix: When installing OpenStack clients or other 'oslo' ecosystem libraries, ensure `oslo.utils` is explicitly installed if `ModuleNotFoundError` issues arise, even if not explicitly listed in `requirements.txt` of the primary application.
gotcha The behavior of string encoding/decoding utilities like `encodeutils.safe_decode` and `encodeutils.safe_encode` changed significantly between Python 2 and Python 3. While current versions of `oslo.utils` only support Python 3, older codebases being migrated may contain assumptions or usage patterns from Python 2 that are no longer valid, particularly regarding `unicode` vs `str` types.
Fix: Thoroughly review all calls to `encodeutils.safe_decode`, `safe_encode`, and `to_utf8` in migrated Python 2 code. Ensure that expected input types (bytes or str) and output types (str or bytes) align with Python 3 string semantics.

Install

pip install oslo.utils Install stable version

Imports

generate_uuid
```
from oslo_utils import uuidutils
```
Used for generating UUIDs.
utcnow
```
from oslo_utils import timeutils
```
Provides timezone-aware UTC datetime objects.
safe_decode
```
from oslo_utils import encodeutils
```
Handles safe decoding of bytes to strings.
raise_without_exc_info
```
from oslo_utils import excutils
```
Utility for re-raising exceptions without retaining full traceback information, common in OpenStack for error handling.
constant_time_compare
```
from oslo_utils import secretutils
```
Provides a constant-time comparison function suitable for cryptography.

Quickstart

This quickstart demonstrates how to generate a UUID and get the current UTC time using two common modules from oslo.utils: `uuidutils` and `timeutils`.

from oslo_utils import uuidutils
from oslo_utils import timeutils

# Generate a UUID
uuid = uuidutils.generate_uuid()
print(f"Generated UUID: {uuid}")

# Get current UTC time
now = timeutils.utcnow()
print(f"Current UTC time: {now}")

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