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Setup up the OPAL Client

Installing the package​

Firstly, let's install the opal-client.

pip install opal-client

Installing OPA​

Next, we will need to install the policy-agent, or in other words OPA to run alongside the OPAL Client.

For installing OPA, please follow [these instructions](https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/latest/#1-download-opa.

If you would like OPAL to execute OPA for you, and act as a watchdog for OPA, we need to make sure it can find the OPA program and make it executable. To do this, please follow the guidance here, but below is an example of what needs to be added.

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/file

If you are currently in the directory where you will be adding OPA, you can run:

export PATH=$PATH:~
note

The client needs network access to this agent to be able to administer updates to it.

Running the OPAL Client and OPA​

To view the general commands and options offered by the opal-client command, please run:

opal-client --help

If you need to learn about specific run option configurations and help, please run:

opal-client run --help

Running the OPAL Client:

opal-client run

Just like the server, all top-level options can be configured using environment-variables files like .env / .ini and command-line options.

The key options to be aware of:​

  • Use options starting with --server to control how the client connects to the server. You will mainly need --server-url to point at the server.

  • Use options starting with --client-api- to control how the client's API service is running.

  • Use --data-topics to control which topics for data updates the client would subscribe to.

  • Use --policy-subscription-dirs to declare what directories in the repository we should subscribe to.

Client install & run recording​