How to manage actions

See also: Action

This document demonstrates how to manage actions.

List all actions

To list the actions defined for a deployed application, use the actions command followed by the deployed charm’s name. For example, assuming you’ve already deployed the git charm, you can find out the actions it supports as below:

juju actions git

This should output:

Action            Description
add-repo          Create a git repository.
add-repo-user     Give a user permissions to access a repository.
add-user          Create a new user.
get-repo          Return the repository's path.
list-repo-users   List all users who have access to a repository.
list-repos        List existing git repositories.
list-user-repos   List all the repositories a user has access to.
list-users        List all users.
remove-repo       Remove a git repository.
remove-repo-user  Revoke a user's permissions to access a repository.
remove-user       Remove a user.

By passing various options, you can also do a number of other things such as specify a model or an output format or request the full schema for all the actions of an application. Below we demonstrate the --schema and --format options:

juju actions git --schema --format yaml

Partial output:

add-repo:
  additionalProperties: false
  description: Create a git repository.
  properties:
    repo:
      description: Name of the git repository.
      type: string
  required:
  - repo
  title: add-repo
  type: object

Note

The full schema is under the properties key of the root action. Actions rely on JSON-Schema for validation. The top-level keys shown for the action (description and properties) may include future additions to the feature.

See more: juju actions

Show details about an action

To see detailed information about an application action, use the show-action command followed by the name of the charm and the name of the action. For example, the code below will show detailed information about the backup action of the postgresql application.

juju show-action postgresql backup

See more: juju show-action

Run an action

Important

Did you know? When you run an action, how the action is run depends on the type of the charm. If your charm is a machine charm, actions are executed on the same machine as the application. If your charm is a Kubernetes charm implementing the sidecar pattern, the action is run in the charm container.

To run an action on a unit, use the run command followed by the name of the unit and the name of the action you want to run.

juju run mysql/3 backup

By using various options, you can choose to run the action in the background, specify a timeout time, pass a list of actions in the form of a YAML file, etc. See the command reference doc for more.

Running an action returns the overall operation ID as well as the individual task ID(s) for each unit.

See more: juju run (before juju v.3.0, run-action)

Manage action tasks

See also: Script tasks

Show details about a task

To drill down to the result of running an action on a specific unit (the stdout, stderror, log messages, etc.), use the show-task command followed by the task ID (returned by the run command). For example,

juju show-task 1

See more: juju show-task

Cancel a task

Suppose you’ve run an action but would now like to cancel the resulting pending or running task. You can do so using the cancel-task command. For example:

juju cancel-task 1

See more: juju cancel-task

Manage action operations

See also: Script operation

View the pending, running, or completed operations

To view the pending, running, or completed status of each juju run ... <action> invocation, run the operations command:

juju operations

This will show the operations corresponding to the actions for all the application units. You can filter this by passing various options (e.g., --actions backup, --units mysql/0, --machines 0,1, --status pending,completed, etc.).

See more: juju operations

Show details about an operation

To see the status of the individual tasks belonging to a given operation, run the show-operation command followed by the operation ID.

juju show-operation 1

As usual, by adding various options, you can specify an output format, choose to watch indefinitely or specify a timeout time, etc.

Debug an action

To debug an action (or more), use the debug-hooks command followed by the name of the unit and the name(s) of the action(s). For example, if you want to check the add-repo action of the git charm, use:

juju debug-hooks git/0 add-repo