libcloud 0.4.2 and SSL

Libcloud 0.4.2 was released yesterday. Among its new features is an important one: SSL certificate validation is now supported when opening a connection to a cloud provider. However, for this to work, you have to jump through a couple of hoops.

1) Python 2.5 doesn't have the ssl module installed (2.6 does) -- so you need to install it from PyPI. The current version for ssl is 1.15.

2) By default, SSL cert validation is disabled in libcloud.

If you open a connection to a provider you get:

/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/libcloud/httplib_ssl.py:55:
UserWarning: SSL certificate verification is disabled, this can pose a
security risk. For more information how to enable the SSL certificate
verification, please visit the libcloud documentation.
 warnings.warn(libcloud.security.VERIFY_SSL_DISABLED_MSG)

To get past the warning, you need to enable SSL cert validation and also provide a path to a file containing common CA certificates (if you don't have that file, you can download cacert.pem from http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html for example). Add these lines before opening a connection:

import libcloud.security
libcloud.security.VERIFY_SSL_CERT = True
libcloud.security.CA_CERTS_PATH.append("/path/to/cacert.pem")

As an aside, the libcloud wiki page on SSL is very helpful and I used it to figure out what to do.