How to enable Retrieve Password setting in Horizon Dashboard

Issue

• Instance has a password injected via the CLI, but you cannot retrieve it within Horizon.
• You can retrieve the password via nova get-password {{instance_id/name}}, but you want to be able to retrieve it with the Horizon dashboard, too.

Prerequisites

• To be able to retrieve the password for Horizon Dashboard, you must be capable of setting it. The minimum requirements to do so are:
  1. The image for the instance must have the property hw_qemu_guest_agent=yes set. You can set this property via running openstack image set --property hw_qemu_guest_agent=yes {{image_id/name}}.
  2. The image itself must have qemu-guest-agent installed and running. A lightweight image like Cirros will not have qemu-guest-agent installed by default, and thus it will not work out of the box on instances backed by a Cirros image.
  3. The instance must be created with a key-pair of type ssh-rsa, which is used to encrypt the password in the metadata service. Without a key-pair set on the instance, the password will not be saved to the metadata service.
  4. You must first set a password on the instance, via nova set-password {{server_uuid/name}}, which will update the metadata service with the password, and allow qemu-guest-agent to change the password on the instance.