Rackspace Cloud DNS offeres a great web console, along with a solid API for managing
DNS records dynamically from CM tools like Chef.
The web UI @ https://mycloud.rackspace.com doesn’t (yet) suppport an action to
export your domain(s) to standard BIND format zone files.
However, the API does support zone file exports,
GET /v1.0/{account}/domains/{domainId}/export
I wanted to create a scheduled Jenkins job to export a domain managed by
Cloud DNS to GitHub for both versioning and disaster recovery.
One gotcha with the API is it’s asynchronous – you request an export, then
periodically poll on the status of the export. The API also has rate limiting.
So, the export is a bit more involved than a simple curl call.
Based on this Rackspace community support post ,
I found a great python utility, clouddns.py by Wichert Akkerman .
Note: I couldn’t use the https://github.com/rackspace/pyrax official SDK,
as I’m on CentOS 6.5 with Python 2.6, and the SDK requires Python 2.7. I also tried
the gist by DavidWittman but failed
to get it working with the LON region despte following
the clouddns README
Here’s the basis of the script I used in a Jenkins job to export a domain and subdomains
every 15 minutes, alongw with the Git publisher for Jenkins to push the changes back to
a GitHub repo.
#!/bin/bash
# exports DNS records from Rackspace Cloud DNS to text files
# Depends on https://github.com/wichert/clouddns/blob/master/src/clouddns.py
set -e
me=export-zone
base_domain=
rackspace_region=
rackspace_rate_limit_delay=3
script_root=$(cd `dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}"` && pwd)
function usage() {
cat << EOF
Usage: `basename "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}"` [domain]
exports a Racksapce Cloud DNS domain and subdomains to zone files"
domain - an optional filter for the domain to export, defaults to all
EOF
exit 1
}
[ "$1" == "-?" ] && usage
[ "$1" == "--help" ] && usage
echo "[$me] verifying Rackspace API credentials ..."
if [ -z "$OS_USERNAME" ] || [ -z "$OS_PASSWORD" ]; then
echo "[$me] error - missing rackspace credentials - you may need a openrc file" >&2
echo "[$me] see http://docs.rackspace.com/servers/api/v2/cs-gettingstarted/content/section_gs_install_nova.html#d6e1129" >&2
exit 1
fi
if echo "$OS_REGION_NAME" | grep -i "LON" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
rackspace_region=uk
else
rackspace_region=us
fi
echo "[$me] verifying python dependencies ..."
if ! python --version >/dev/null 2>&1; then
echo "[$me] error - python runtime not found" >&2
echo "[$me] see https://www.python.org/downloads/" >&2
exit 2
fi
if ! pip --version >/dev/null 2>&1; then
echo "[$me] error - missing python dependency - pip" >&2
echo "[$me] see https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/installing.html" >&2
exit 2
fi
if ! pip install --user isodate >/dev/null; then
echo "[$me] error - pip install isodate failed" >&2
exit 3
fi
if ! pip install --user requests >/dev/null; then
echo "[$me] error - pip install requets failed" >&2
exit 3
fi
echo "[$me] downloading wichert/clouddns from GitHub ..."
curl -L -o "$script_root/clouddns.py" 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wichert/clouddns/master/src/clouddns.py'
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
base_domain="."
else
base_domain="$1"
fi
clouddns_command="python ""$script_root/clouddns.py"" --region ""$rackspace_region"" \
--username ""$OS_USERNAME"" \
--api ""$OS_PASSWORD"""
echo "[$me] exporting zone files for $base_domain ..."
domain_list=`$clouddns_command list | \
awk '{print $1}' | \
grep "$base_domain" | \
sort`
for domain in $domain_list;
do
echo "[$me] exporting $domain ..."
# ignore errors in exporting a subdomain, which can happen due to rate limiting
# assume the next run will export the subdomain
set +e
$clouddns_command export-zone "$domain" > "$domain.txt"
set -e
# avoid Rackspace API rate limiting errors
echo "[$me] sleeping $rackspace_rate_limit_delay seconds ..."
sleep $rackspace_rate_limit_delay
done
exit 0