Easier juju charms with Python helpers

Have you ever wished you could just declare the installed state of your juju charm like this?

deploy_user:
    group.present:
        - gid: 1800
    user.present:
        - uid: 1800
        - gid: 1800
        - createhome: False
        - require:
            - group: deploy_user

exampleapp:
    group.present:
        - gid: 1500
    user.present:
        - uid: 1500
        - gid: 1500
        - createhome: False
        - require:
            - group: exampleapp


/srv/{{ service_name }}:
    file.directory:
        - group: exampleapp
        - user: exampleapp
        - require:
            - user: exampleapp
        - recurse:
            - user
            - group


/srv/{{ service_name }}/{{ instance_type }}-logs:
    file.directory:
        - makedirs: True

While writing charms for Juju a long time ago, one of the things that I struggled with was testing the hook code – specifically the install hook code where the machine state is set up (ie. packages installed, directories created with correct permissions, config files setup etc.) Often the test code would be fragile – at best you can patch some attributes of your module (like “code_location = ‘/srv/example.com/code'”) to a tmp dir and test the state correctly, but at worst you end up testing the behaviour of your code (ie. os.mkdir was called with the correct user/group etc.). Either way, it wasn’t fun to write and iterate those tests.

But support has improved over the past year with the charmhelpers library. And recently I landed a branch adding support for declaring saltstack states in yaml, like the above example. That means that the install hook of your hooks.py can be reduced to something like:

import charmhelpers.core.hookenv
import charmhelpers.payload.execd
import charmhelpers.contrib.saltstack


hooks = charmhelpers.core.hookenv.Hooks()


@hooks.hook()
def install():
    """Setup the machine dependencies and installed state."""
    charmhelpers.contrib.saltstack.install_salt_support()
    charmhelpers.contrib.saltstack.update_machine_state(
        'machine_states/dependencies.yaml')
    charmhelpers.contrib.saltstack.update_machine_state(
        'machine_states/installed.yaml')


# Other hooks...

if __name__ == "__main__":
    hooks.execute(sys.argv)

…letting you focus on testing and writing the actual hook functionality (like relation-set’s etc. I’d like to add some test helpers that will automatically check the syntax of the state yaml files and template rendering output, but haven’t yet).

Hopefully we can add similar support for puppet and Ansible soon too, so that the charmer can choose the tools they want to use to declare the local machine state.

A few other things that I found valuable while writing my charm:

• Use a branch for charmhelpers – this way you can make improvements to the library as you develop and not be dependent on your changes landing straight away to deploy (thanks Sidnei – I think I just copied that idea from one of his charms). The easiest way that I found for that was to install the branch into mycharm/lib so that it’s included in both dev and when you deploy (with a small snippet in your hooks.py.
• Make it easy to deploy your local charm from the branch… the easiest way I found was a link-test-juju-repo make target – I’m not sure what other people do here?
• In terms of writing actual hook functionality (like relation-set events etc), I found the easiest way to develop the charm was to iterate within a debug-hook session. Something like:
  1. write new test+code then juju upgrade-charm or add-relation
  2. run the hook and if it fails…
  3. fix and test right there within the debug-hook
  4. put the code back into my actual charm branch and update the test
  5. restore the system state in debug hook
  6. then juju upgrade-charm again to ensure it works, if it fails, iterate from 3.
• Use the built-in support of template rendering from saltstack for rendering any config files that you need.

I don’t think I’d really appreciated the beauty of what juju is doing until, after testing my charm locally together with a gunicorn charm and a solr backend, I then setup a config using juju-deployer to create a full stack with an Apache front-end, a cache load balancer for multiple squid caches, as well as a load balancer in front of potentially multiple instances of my charms wsgi app, then a back-end loadbalancer in between my app and the (multiple) solr backends… and it just works.