Charm Box

Charm box is a container project that provides a Juju Charm development environment. The charmbox container includes tools for building, testing, and reviewing Juju Charms.

Juju is an open source, universal model for applications. Juju allows you to deploy, configure, manage, maintain, and scale cloud services quickly and efficiently on public clouds, as well as on physical servers.

This container comes with the basic tools you need to get started with Juju and Charms. It includes charm-tools to build charms and bundletester to test charms.

This container is built on top of the jujubox container, adding tools and functionality. Refer to the jujubox project for more information about the options to run that container and the volumes available.

To use this container you need to install Docker, download charmbox, and run charmbox.

Install Docker

Linux

Install Docker using the package manager for your Linux distribution, or get.docker.com. We recommend Docker version 1.6 or greater.

Mac OS X

There are several ways to install Docker on Mac OS X. Consult the latest documentation on Getting Started with Docker for Mac.

Download charmbox

The easiest way to use charmbox is to simply pull the container from the Docker hub.

docker pull jujusolutions/charmbox

If you want to see the code you can download the charmbox project from github and build it from source.

git clone https://github.com/juju-solutions/charmbox.git && cd charmbox
docker build -t jujusolutions/charmbox ./

Run charmbox

There are several different ways to run charmbox depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Build Charms

The main use case for charm box is to build charms from layers and interfaces. By using charmbox you do not need to install and configure the tools.

As with jujubox you should volume mount (-v) $JUJU_DATA directory from the host to the charmbox container so you preserve the Juju information between runs. The output from a charm build will be in /home/ubuntu/charms/ so mount the $JUJU_REPOSITORY directory to preserve the built artifacts. To have access to the layers and interfaces, mount the $CHARM_LAYERS_DIR and $CHARM_INTERFACES_DIR from the host to the charmbox container. Remember the charmbox file system is reset after you exit the container.

docker run --rm -it \
  -v $JUJU_DATA:/home/ubuntu/.local/share/juju \
  -v $JUJU_REPOSITORY:/home/ubuntu/charms \
  -v $CHARM_LAYERS_DIR:/home/ubuntu/charms/layers \
  -v $CHARM_INTERFACES_DIR:/home/ubuntu/charms/interfaces \
  jujusolutions/charmbox

Test Charms

Another use case for charmbox is to use the test tools included. In this case you may need to mount the charm or bundle directory and run the bundletester tool. You can map the current workign directory into charmbox for testing a bundle or charm.

docker run --rm -it \
  -v $JUJU_DATA:/home/ubuntu/.local/share/juju \
  -v $JUJU_REPOSITORY:/home/ubuntu/charms \
  -v $PWD:/home/ubuntu/pwd \
  jujusolutions/charmbox

See the Environment Variables reference for more details on $JUJU_DATA, $JUJU_REPOSITORY, $CHARM_LAYERS_DIR and $CHARM_INTERFACES_DIR.

charmbox and the LXD provider

At this time you can not run charmbox with the LXD provider inside of Docker because of some nested container issues. If you want to use the LXD provider, install Juju and LXD on the host system.

More information

For more information about what you can do in charmbox check out the Juju documenation.

If you find any bugs please create an issue in the charmbox github repository.