AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'get'

[Turbo Fredriksson]

I'm getting this when running

  openstack flavor list

and many other commands. Running with --debug, I see:

  Making authentication request to http://control:35357/v3/auth/tokens
  "POST /v3/auth/tokens HTTP/1.1" 201 11701
  run(Namespace(all=False, columns=[], formatter='table', limit=None, long=False, marker=None, max_width=0, noindent=False, public=True, quote_mode='nonnumeric'))
  Instantiating compute client for VAPI Version Major: 2, Minor: 0
  Making authentication request to http://control:35357/v3/auth/tokens
  "POST /v3/auth/tokens HTTP/1.1" 201 11701
  REQ: curl -g -i -X GET http://10.0.4.1:8774/v2/1857a7b08b8046038005b98e8b238843/flavors/detail -H "User-Agent: python-novaclient" -H "Accept: application/json" -H "X-Auth-Token: {SHA1}226eb1000d0f69fb06823fefb599f559729e0969"
  Starting new HTTP connection (1): 10.0.4.1
  "GET /v2/1857a7b08b8046038005b98e8b238843/flavors/detail HTTP/1.1" 503 170
  RESP: [503] Content-Length: 170 Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8 X-Compute-Request-Id: req-f296672e-afa4-455a-ab14-2d9749658521 Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2016 12:33:58 GMT Connection: keep-alive
  RESP BODY: {"message": "The server is currently unavailable. Please try again at a later time.<br /><br />\n\n\n", "code": "503 Service Unavailable", "title": "Service Unavailable"}

So it would be "nice" (!!) if it could actually SAY that - that it can't connect to the service! Not just some descriptive Python code error.

[Augustina Ragwitz (auggy)]

Hi Turbo, I'm a little confused. Are you reporting a bug for the issue that is triggering the "unicode object has no attribute get" error or are you simply saying that that error itself is a bug and should be more descriptive? Either way, please provide detailed steps to reproduce this error so we can help you debug.

[Turbo Fredriksson (turbo-bayour)]

The latter. Finding out why something fails, should not require adding --debug and dig through large number of texts, which, if you're not fluent in Python, is not that much better.

The error should have been [something like]:

  The server is currently unavailable. Please try again at a later time.

This is already available in the message, just not shown to the user.

However, that is only marginally better than the original error message. It would be better to know WHAT server that's "currently unavailable". Without knowing in depth, grepping configs etc, etc, I have no idea what server/service is listening on the port mentioned ("8774" in this case).

So a better message should be:

  The Nova compute service is currently unavailable. Please try again at a later time.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for OpenStack Compute (nova) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]