[Freeipa-users] JSON-RPC documentation?

[Rob Crittenden]

Dmitri Pal wrote:
> On 01/14/2013 08:16 PM, Brian Smith wrote:
>> Before I pester the dev list, I was wondering if anyone here could
>> point me to documentation on the JSON-RPC interface to FreeIPA.  I'm
>> not doing anything fancy, just adding users and updating passwords, so
>> my requirements are pretty tame.  I've gone through the Python code
>> and have somewhat pieced it together myself, but would be more
>> comfortable if there were official docs.
>>
> I do not remember us having documentation about XML-RPC but I will check.
> We are actually debating deprecating XML-RPC over time in favor of JSON.

There is no official documentation on either XML-RPC or JSON. The format 
is rather straightforward once you get the hang of things. Each command 
is effectively an RPC function (e.g ipa user-add -> user_add). The 
arguments consist of positional arguments followed by named arguments 
(there is usually only one positional arg).

For XML-RPC it is generally fairly easy to work out what it's doing by 
adding -vv option to the command-line to see the raw request and 
response. I personally haven't done a lot of raw JSON work.

The final option is to skip all that and use the ipalib to do the work 
for you.

For example, to add a user you'd do something like:

from ipalib import api
from ipalib import errors

api.bootstrap(context='cli')
api.finalize()
api.Backend.xmlclient.connect()

try:
     api.Command['user_add'](u'newuser',
                             loginshell=u'/bin/something',
                             givenname=u'New', sn=u'User')
except errors.DuplicateEntry:
     print "user already exists"
else:
     print "user added"