You're trying to create a tenant -- you must provide the URL of your Keystone authentication server for that command to complete successfully, that's what OS_AUTH_URL environment variable (or the CLI argument --os_auth_url ) is for. Assuming you have a single node installation, it would be along the lines of -- http://localhost:35357/v2.0

Reference -- http://docs.openstack.org/developer/keystone/configuration.html

Also, you can populate the Keystone authentication environment variables into an RC file:

$ cat keystonerc_admin
export OS_USERNAME=admin
export OS_TENANT_NAME=admin
export OS_PASSWORD=passwd
export OS_AUTH_URL=http://192.169.142.49:35357/v2.0/
export PS1='[\u@\h \W(keystone_admin)]$'

which needs to be sourced, so the environment variables take effect:

$ source keystonerc_admin