I think the best way to start messing with openstack is to install openstack using devstack. Its easy, customizable, easy to debug and the best part is one can simply discard the installed one and install new one in no time ! So I'll be giving you the steps to install openstack on a physical box. i.e all the component of the openstack will be installed on a single machine. Steps to follow. 1. Create a user as 'stack'. adduser stack 2.Install sudo and give the user 'stack' the sudo permission as most of the installation requires sudo permission. apt-get install sudo -y || yum install -y sudo echo "stack ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoers 2a. Once done with that, one can assign a password by doing passwd stack and then logout as root and login back as stack for all of the below steps. 3.Get the openstack code. The steps are install git and clone the code from github. sudo apt-get install git -y || yum instal