Image Locator's releasesTable is invalid json

[Joe Julian]

When attempting to parse the output of

    curl -s -H "Accept: application/json" https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/releasesTable

as json, it fails as the last item in the aaData array has a trailing comma, which it shouldn't.

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

Hi Joe,

The JSON at that URL isn't guaranteed to have a stable format, not is it GPG-signed, so I wouldn't recommend depending on it; it's only intended for use by the locator front-end. Instead, I would recommend investigating the streams that are available at http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/streams/v1/.

If you're on Ubuntu, you can install the simplestreams package to get some tools for working with the format. If you aren't, you can use the bzr branch at lp:simplestreams, which is the upstream for the package. (Or, of course, you can just roll your own client-side code. :p)

Thanks,

Dan

[Joe Julian (joe.julian)]

Thanks Dan. Might I suggest that some documentation is missing somewhere to make this method more easily found? Perhaps on the locator pages themselves?

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

Thanks Joe, that's a great idea! I've filed bug 1680870 for that.