How to install Dradis on OpenStack

This guide was created based on the instructions generously provided to us by a Dradis Pro user.

Installing Dradis on OpenStack is fairly straight-forward and consists of a few additional steps in addition to the standard installation process. On a high level:

• Locally downloading the image
• Locally converting the image
• Uploading the image to OpenStack
• Deploying the machine
• Running the traditional setup

Locally downloading the image

Create a folder to keep the files we need (~/Dradis in this example).

> mkdir ~/Dradis

Download the OVA from the Dradis support website, at the time of writing dradis-professional-x86_64-20201208.ova and move it to your newly created folder.

$ cd ~/Dradis

$ mv ~/Downloads/dradis-professional-x86_64-20201208.ova .

Locally converting the image

Unpack the image using the tar command, this will leave you with three files:

• dradis-professional-x86_64-20201208.ova
• dradis-professional-x86_64-20201208-disk001.vmdk
• dradis-professional-x86_64-20201208.ovf

$ tar -xvf dradis-professional-x86_64-20201208.ova

We are now only interested in the actual disk: the *-disk001.vmdk, this we can convert using the qemu-img command:

$ qemu-img convert dradis-professional-x86_64-20201208-disk001.vmdk Dradis-pro-20201208.qcow2 -O qcow2

If you do not have the command, you need to install qemu-utils which contain qemu-img, this can be done with for example APT apt install qemu-img.

Uploading image

OpenStack CLI tools

If have the OpenStack CLI tools installed, you can skip this step. Otherwise do the following to install the CLI tools:

$ pip install python-openstackclient

OpenStack API user

If you have an OpenStack API user, you can skip this step. Otherwise create your API user and set a password on OpenStack, this can easily be done through the web interface. Then download the RC-file:

Create a new API user, allowing you to download the RC-file after creation.

Interacting with the API

Now you are ready to interact with the API, see if you can list your current images:

$ openstack image list

If you are presented with an error Missing value auth-url required for auth plugin password, try to source your .rc file. This should be done every time before you can utilize the OpenStack API:

$ source ~/openstack.rc

If that works, you can upload your newly converted image to OpenStack! You can do so with the command below:

$ openstack image create --private --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare --file ~/Dradis/Dradis-pro-20201208.qcow2 --min-disk 80 --min-ram 8 'Dradis Professional 20201208 x64'

As the current image in qcow2 is 6GB in size, upload can take a while depending on your Internet speed. After uploading is finished, use either the web application or the CLI tools openstack image list to verify that your image is succesfully created:

Deploying the machine

Now you should be able to create a new server, using your freshly converted and uploaded Dradis image. Either through the API or the webapp create a server up to the specifications in the FAQ:

Access the VNC remote console to unlock the encrypted drive using the default credentials found on the [Dradis portal](https://portal.securityroots.com/releases/) under the specific release.

Setup your security groups so that you can access the machine if required.

Then continue setup as per the deployment guide.