Juju Charms, Unboxed!

This project serves as my learning journal for Juju Charms in general.

In this repo, I make attempts to dive into the internals of a how a charm is deployed and handled by Juju so I have to get rid of as much of the guard rails as possible. That is, I have to "unbox" Juju Charms.

If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea and would much rather get actual work done, then may I suggest that you start with the Operator Framework as well as the charmcraft tool.

Please note that while I'm an employee of Canonical, the work that I do in this repo represent my own personal journey. Any opinionated-ness that you observe here, real or imagined, do not necessarily represent the views of Canonical unless explicitely stated.

Demo Videos

Part 1 Part 2

First Make Sure You've Got a Juju model on k8s Running

If you don't have one, you can create it on top of microk8s as follows:

which microk8s && sudo snap remove microk8s
which juju && sudo snap remove juju
sudo snap install --channel=2.8/stable juju --classic
sudo snap install --channel=1.18/stable microk8s --classic
sudo microk8s.enable dns dashboard registry storage metrics-server ingress
sudo snap install --channel=1.18/stable kubectl --classic
mkdir -p ~/.kube
sudo microk8s.config > ~/.kube/config
juju add-k8s k8s-1.18
juju bootstrap k8s-1.18 juju-2-8-1
juju add-model demo

Now Let's Rock and Roll!

Build, and deploy the charm:

make build && juju deploy ./unboxed.charm

Optionally set the Juju log level to DEBUG:

juju model-config logging-config="<root>=DEBUG;<unit>=TRACE"

Now follow the log:

juju debug-log --replay --include-module unit

Developer's Guide

Prepare Your Python Environment (venv style)

Create your virtual environment:

python3 -m venv ./venv

Activate it in every shell session where you intend to run make or the unit tests

source ./venv/bin/activate

Prepare Your Python Environment (pyenv style)

You should already have pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv installed

Install Python 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7

pyenv install 3.7.7

NOTE: For more available versions, run pyenv install --list

Create a virtualenv for this project

export charm_name=unboxed
pyenv virtualenv 3.7.7 ${charm_name}-3.7.7

Your newly created virtualenv should now be automatically activated if your prompt changed to the following:

(unboxed-3.7.7) ubuntu@dev...

or, should you happen to be using dotfiles.relaxdiego.com, if it changed tothe following

... via 🐍 v3.7.7 (unboxed-3.7.7)

Notice the things in parentheses that corresponds to the virtualenv you created in the previous step. This is thanks to the coordination of pyenv-virtualenv and the .python-version file in the rootdir of this project.

If you cd .. or cd anywhere else outside your project directory, the virtualenv will automatically be deactivated. When you cd back into the project dir, the virtualenv will automatically be activated.

Install The Dependencies

Install all development and runtime dependencies.

WARNING: Make sure you are using a virtualenv before running this command. Since it uses pip-sync to install dependencies, it will remove any package that is not listed in either requirements-dev.in or setup.py. If you followed the steps in any of the Prepare Your Development Environment sections above, then you should be in good shape.

make dependencies

Adding A Development Dependency

Add it to requirements-dev.in and then run make:

echo "foo" >> requirements-dev.in
make dependencies

This will create requirements-dev.txt and then install all dependencies

Commit requirements-dev.in and requirements-dev.txt. Both files should now be updated and the foo package installed in your local machine. Make sure to commit both files to the repo to let your teammates know of the new dependency.

git add requirements-dev.*
git commit -m "Add foo to requirements-dev.txt"
git push origin

Adding A Runtime Dependency

Add it to runtime_requirements list in setup.py and then run:

make dependencies

This will create requirements.txt and then install all dependencies

Commit setup.py and requirements.txt. Both files should now be updated and the foo package installed in your local machine. Make sure to commit both files to the repo to let your teammates know of the new dependency.

git add requirements.txt
git add setup.py
git commit -m "Add bar to requirements.txt"
git push origin

Testing and Building the Charm

After any change in the charm code, you want to ensure that all unit tests pass before building it. This can be easily done by running:

make test build

Viewing the Coverage Report

To view the coverage report, run the tests first and then run:

make coverage-server

This will run a simple web server on port 5000 that will serve the files in the auto-generated htmlcov/ directory. You may leave this server running in a separate session as you run the tests so that you can just switch back to the browser and hit refresh to see the changes to your coverage down to the line of code.

Running the Tests in Multiple Python Versions

More often than not your charm needs to support more than one version of Python. This is where tox comes in. Just run the following to get test results for all Python versions listed in tox.ini's envlist config option

tox

Need A Fresh Start?

Sigh, oh what we'd give to get a fresh start in life, huh? Oh, wait, you mean just the project directory's state? Oh, well we got you covered there too! Just run:

make clean

Really Clean Everything

If you want to remove everything that make created including the compiled requirements*.txt files, then run the following:

make clean all=t

relaxdiego / unboxed