How to be notified when a droplet is active after its creation

Question

I'm working on an automation script with the DO API and Ansible. I can create a lot of droplets but how to know if the created droplets has been active?

The first (naive) approach uses the following process:

A. Create droplet with the Digital Ocean API
B. Call the API to get the created droplet informations
    1. is active ?
        yes : 
        no : go to B

In the best world, after the droplet creation, I will be notified (like a webhook executed when the droplet creation is finished). Is it possible?

Answer 1

Looking at the API docs https://developers.digitalocean.com/documentation/v2/

You should be able to see the status of the Droplet (see the droplets section).

Using your logic you could:

1. Create droplet and store the id in a variable
2. Sleep 1 Minute
3. Call the droplet with the id /v2/droplets/$DROPLET_ID.
4. Test the response status (A status string indicating the state of the Droplet instance. This may be "new", "active", "off", or "archive".).
5. If status == new do something

UPDATE

Another method would be to modify the droplet as it is created. With Digital ocean you can pass User Data, previously I have used this to configure servers automatically, here is an example.

$user_data = <<<EOD
#!/bin/bash

apt-get update 
apt-get -y install apache2 
apt-get -y install php5 
apt-get -y install php5-mysql 
apt-get -y install unzip 
service apache2 restart 
cd /var/www/html 
mkdir pack 
cd pack 
wget --user {$wgetUser} --password {$wgetPass} http://x.x.x.x/pack.tar.gz
tar -xvf pack.tar.gz 
php update.php
EOD;


    //Start of the droplet creation
    $data = array(
                    "name"=>"AutoRes".$humanProv.strtoupper($lang), 
                    "region"=>randomRegion(), 
                    "size"=>"512mb", 
                    "image"=>"ubuntu-14-04-x64",
                    "ssh_keys"=>$sshKey,
                    "backups"=>false,
                    "ipv6"=>false,
                    "user_data"=>$user_data,
                    "private_networking"=>null,
                    );

    $chDroplet = curl_init('https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets');
    curl_setopt($chDroplet, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "POST");
    curl_setopt($chDroplet, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($data)  );
    curl_setopt($chDroplet, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
        'Authorization: Bearer '.$apiKey,
        'Content-Type: application/json',
        'Content-Length: ' . strlen(json_encode($data)),
    ));

Basically once the droplet is active it will run these commands and then download a tar.gz file from my server and execute it, you could potentially create update.php to call your server and therefore update it that the droplet is online.