semicolon separated parameters are not taken from CLI

[Anant Patil]

I tried to create a stack from CLI using following command:

heat stack-create hello -f /opt/stack/heat-templates/hot/hello_world.yaml --parameters key_name=heat_key;flavor=m1.tiny;admin_pass=admin;image=cirros-0.3.2-x86_64-uec

It fails with:
ERROR: The Parameter (admin_pass) was not provided.

When I print all the args from shell.py, it includes only the first parameter i.e. heat_key in this case.

[Anant Patil (ananta)]

It looks like is a shell problem, the first semicolon terminating the CLI command. Either the semicolons should be escaped or the parameter key-value pairs must be enclosed in quotes.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Example:

heat stack-create hello1 -f /opt/stack/heat-templates/hot/hello_world.yaml -P "flavor=m1.tiny;admin_pass=Admin24;image=cirros-0.3.2-x86_64-uec;key_name=heat-key"

or

heat stack-create hello -f /opt/stack/heat-templates/hot/hello_world.yaml -P flavor=m1.tiny\;admin_pass=admin\;image=cirros-0.3.2-x86_64-uec\;key_name=heat-key

-----------------------------------------------------------------

May be we should use some other character to separate the key-value pairs given in parameters?

[Steve Baker (steve-stevebaker)]

I would recommend just specifying --parameters multiple times, ie

-P key_name=heat_key -P flavor=m1.tiny -P admin_pass=admin -P image=cirros-0.3.2-x86_64-uec

[Anant Patil (ananta)]

While the recommendation sounds good, it doesn't address the problem.
We can specify the --parameters each time, but is tedious to type! The ability
to specify key-value pairs as semicolon separated values is really handy.

This bug was filed to bring to everyone's notice that if we don't take enough care w.r.t to
either fixing it or documenting it, the user can end-up with a stack with resources having
unintended properties. The first semicolon terminates the command, and the remaining
parameters are ignored, and default values for the remaining ones will be taken from the
template for creating resources, and that is not what user expected.

IMHO, the consequence of this must be carefully considered before marking it as invalid.

[Steve Baker (steve-stevebaker)]

-P is much shorter than --parameters. Also semicolon works fine when the value is quoted. For these 2 reasons I don't see any issue which needs to be fixed.