REST API query to discover hosts associated with activation key

Support
1

Problem:
In the web interface I can view the hosts that are associated (via registration) with an activation key by selecting “Associations → Content Hosts”. I’ve been unable to find a way to obtain the list of associated hosts in the REST API given the value of the activation key. How can this be done?

Expected outcome:
JSON output from a REST API query that shows the content hosts associated with a given activation key.

Foreman and Proxy versions:
foreman-3.12.0.7-1.el8sat.noarch
foreman-proxy-3.12.0-1.el8sat.noarch

Foreman and Proxy plugin versions:
?

Distribution and version:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 (Ootpa)
Red Hat Satellite (build: 6.16.4)

Other relevant data:

2

Hi,

you can get that via the hosts API endpoint with a search parameter like this:

https://yourforeman.example.com/api/hosts?organization=yourorg&search=activation_key=your_ak_name

Regards

2 Likes
3

Okay that works, thank you! I find it strange because I expected to see an activation_keys entry when I used the /api/hosts endpoint to view a particular host, however, I was querying the host with /api/hosts?search=name=HOSTNAME (because I don’t have the host’s :id available at this point), which returns a wildly reduced set of information as compared to /api/hosts/:id, and there are no activation_keys entries returned in the search= output, so I thought I was barking up the wrong tree by using the /api/hosts endpoint. Why the difference? I find this confusing.

4

I cannot tell you why /api/hosts only gives a subset of every hosts attributes, though in my experience this is true for several object types in the Foreman API.
Though, I can give you a few general tips for working with the API:

  • You can find the API Docs for your Foreman version and all Plugins you have installed at https://yourforeman/apidoc. Most endpoints that support searching will list the available search fields there.
  • Most API endpoints (including /api/hosts) will accept names in the ID field, so you can query /api/hosts/<fqdn>. directly. I believe it’s mostly Katello objects where this is not working properly, usually because those are scoped on a per-org basis by default and do not require to have globally unique names.
5

Aha! Now that I would not have expected. It works great and avoids the need for an intermediate lookup of the host ID. Thanks!

1 Like