The Yo Charm. It's that simple.

It's that simple.

It was about 4pm on Friday afternoon, when I had just about wrapped up everything I absolutely needed to do for the day, and I decided to kick back and have a little fun with the remainder of my work day.

 It's now 4:37pm on Friday, and I'm now done.

Done with what?  The Yo charm, of course!

The Internet has been abuzz this week about the how the Yo app received a whopping $1 million dollars in venture funding.  (Forbes notes that this is a pretty surefire indication that there's another internet bubble about to burst...)

It's little more than the first program any kid writes -- hello world!

Subsequently I realized that we don't really have a "hello world" charm.  And so here it is, yo.

$ juju deploy yo

Deploying up a webpage that says "Yo" is hardly the point, of course.  Rather, this is a fantastic way to see the absolute simplest form of a Juju charm.  Grab the source, and go explore it yo-self!

$ charm-get yo
$ tree yo
├── config.yaml
├── copyright
├── hooks
│   ├── config-changed
│   ├── install
│   ├── start
│   ├── stop
│   ├── upgrade-charm
│   └── website-relation-joined
├── icon.svg
├── metadata.yaml
└── README.md
1 directory, 11 files

• The config.yaml let's you set and dynamically changes the service itself (the color and size of the font that renders "Yo").
• The copyright is simply boilerplate GPLv3
• The icon.svg is just a vector graphics "Yo."
• The metadata.yaml explains what this charm is, how it can relate to other charms
• The README.md is a simple getting-started document
• And the hooks...
• config-changed is the script that runs when you change the configuration -- basically, it uses sed to inline edit the index.html Yo webpage
• install simply installs apache2 and overwrites /var/www/index.html
• start and stop simply starts and stops the apache2 service
• upgrade-charm is currently a no-op
• website-relation-joined sets and exports the hostname and port of this system

The website relation is very important here...  Declaring and defining this relation instantly lets me relate this charm with dozens of other services.  As you can see in the screenshot at the top of this post, I was able to easily relate the varnish website accelerator in front of the Yo charm.

Hopefully this simple little example might help you examine the anatomy of a charm for the first time, and perhaps write your own first charm!

Cheers,

Dustin