This charm makes it easy to deploy a Juju GUI into an existing environment.

The Juju GUI supports recent releases of the Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer web browsers.

The Juju GUI runs a Demo environment on demo.jujucharms.com. From there, you can browse charms, try the GUI, and build an example environment to export for use elsewhere.

A staging server is also available, running the latest and greatest version.

Juju Quickstart is an opinionated command-line tool that quickly starts Juju and the GUI, whether you've never installed Juju or you have an existing Juju environment running.

For installation on precise and utopic, you'll need to enable the Juju PPA by first executing:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:juju/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install juju-quickstart

For trusty the PPA is not required and you simply need to install it with:

sudo apt-get install juju-quickstart

At this point, just running juju-quickstart will deploy the Juju GUI. When possible, Quickstart conserves resources by installing the GUI on the bootstrap node. This colocation is not possible when using a local (LXC) environment.

Quickstart ends by opening the browser and automatically logging the user into the GUI, to observe and manage the environment visually. By default, the deployment uses self-signed certificates. The browser will ask you to accept a security exception once.

Deploying the Juju GUI can be accomplished using Juju itself.

You need a configured and bootstrapped Juju environment: see the Juju docs about getting started, and then run the usual bootstrap command.

juju bootstrap

Next, you simply need to deploy the charm and expose it.

juju deploy juju-gui
juju expose juju-gui

The instructions above cause you to use a separate machine to work with the GUI. If you'd like to reduce your machine footprint (and perhaps your costs), you can colocate the GUI with the Juju bootstrap node, e.g.:

juju deploy juju-gui --to 0

Finally, you need to identify the GUI's URL. It can take a few minutes for the GUI to be built and to start; this command will let you see when it is ready to go by giving you regular status updates:

watch juju status

Eventually, at the end of the status you will see something that looks like this:

services:
  juju-gui:
    charm: cs:trusty/juju-gui-42
    exposed: true
    relations: {}
    units:
      juju-gui/0:
        agent-state: started
        machine: 1
        open-ports:
        - 80/tcp
        - 443/tcp
        public-address: ec2-www-xxx-yyy-zzz.compute-1.amazonaws.com

That means you can go to the public-address in my browser via HTTPS (https://ec2-www-xxx-yyy-zzz.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ in this example), and start configuring the rest of Juju with the GUI. You should see a similar web address. Accessing the GUI via HTTP will redirect to using HTTPS.

By default, the deployment uses self-signed certificates. The browser will ask you to accept a security exception once.

You will see a login form with the username field prefilled to "admin". The password is the same as your Juju environment's admin-secret. The login screen includes hints about where to find the environment's password.

When using the default options the charm uses the network connection only for installing Deb packages from the default Ubuntu repositories. For this reason the charm can be deployed behind a firewall in the usual way.

While the Juju GUI itself is a client-side JavaScript application, the charm installation also involves configuring and starting a GUI server, which is required to serve the application files and to enable some advanced features, so that using the GUI results in a seamless and powerful experience. This server is called GUI server or builtin server.

The builtin server is already included in the charm. For this reason, it does not require any external dependencies. The builtin server provides the following functionalities:

1. It serves the Juju GUI static files, including support for ETags and basic server side URL routing.
2. It supports running the GUI over TLS (HTTPS) or in insecure mode (HTTP).
3. It redirects secure WebSocket connections established by the browser to the real Juju API endpoint. This way the GUI can connect the WebSocket to the host and port where it is currently running, so that the already accepted self signed certificate is reused and the connection succeeds.
4. It supports running the Juju GUI browser tests if the charm is configured accordingly.
5. It exposes an API for bundles deployment. This way bundles can be deployed very easily using the GUI, by selecting a bundle from the GUI browser or just dragging and dropping a bundle YAML file to the GUI canvas.
6. It allows for logging in into the GUI via a timed token. This is used, for instance, by Juju Quickstart to allow automatic user's authentication.
7. It supports deploying local charms by proxying browser HTTPS connections to the Juju HTTPS API backend. This also includes retrieving and listing local charms' files.
8. By default, it listens on port 443 for HTTPS secure connections, and redirects port 80 requests to port 443. The port where the server is listening can be changed using the charm configuration "port" option.

If you run into problems with the charm, please feel free to contact us on the Juju mailing list, or on Freenode's IRC network on #juju. We're not always around (working hours in Europe and North America are your best bets), but if you send us a mail or ping "jujugui" we will eventually get back to you.

If you want to help develop the charm, please see the charm's HACKING.md.