Calling WSO2 Admin Services in Python

I’m using some WSO2 middleware for my ongoing research, and recently I had the requirement of calling some admin services from Python 2.7. All WSO2 products expose a number of special administrative web services (admin services), using which the WSO2 server instances can be controlled, configured and monitored. In fact, all the web-based UI components that ship with WSO2 middleware make use of these admin services under the hood to manage the server runtime.

WSO2 admin services are SOAP services (based on Apache Axis2), and are secured using HTTP basic authentication. All admin services expose a WSDL document using which client applications can be written or generated to consume the admin services. In this post I’m going to summarize how to implement a simple Python client to consume the WSO2 admin services.

We will be writing our Python client using the Suds SOAP library for Python. Suds is simple, lightweight and extremely easy to use. As the first step, we should install Suds. Depending on the Python package manager you wish to use, one of the following commands should do the trick (tested on OS X and Ubuntu):

sudo easy_install suds
sudo pip install suds

Next we need to instruct the target WSO2 server product to expose the admin service WSDLs. By default these WSDLs are hidden. To unhide them, open up the repository/conf/carbon.xml file of the WSO2 product, and set the value of HideAdminServiceWSDLs parameter to false:

<HideAdminServiceWSDLs>false</HideAdminServiceWSDLs>

Now restart the WSO2 server, and you should be able to access the admin service WSDLs using a web browser. For example, to access the WSDL of the UserAdmin service, point your browser to http://localhost:9443/services/UserAdmin?wsdl

Now we can go ahead and write the Python code to consume any of the available admin services. Here’s a working sample that consumes the UserAdmin service. This simply prints out a list of roles defined in the WSO2 User Management component:

from suds.client import Client
from suds.transport.http import HttpAuthenticated
import logging

if __name__ == '__main__':
    #logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO)
    #logging.getLogger('suds.client').setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

    t = HttpAuthenticated(username='admin', password='admin')
    client = Client('https://localhost:9443/services/UserAdmin?wsdl', location='https://localhost:9443/services/UserAdmin', transport=t)
    print client.service.getAllRolesNames()

That’s pretty much it. I have tested this approach with several WSO2 admin services, and they all seem to work without any issues. If you need to debug something, uncomment the two commented out lines in the above example. That will print all the SOAP messages and the HTTP headers that are being exchanged.

I also tried to write a client using the popular SOAPy library, but unfortunately couldn’t get it to work due to several bugs in SOAPy. SOAPy was incapable of retrieving the admin service WSDLs over HTTPS. This can be worked around by using the HTTP URL for the WSDL, but in that case SOAPy failed to generate the correct request messages to call the admin services. Basically, the namespaces of the generated SOAP messages were messed up. But with Suds I didn’t run into any issues.