Misleading error message when trying to deploy a local charm that's not found

[Casey Marshall]

I was trying to deploy a local charm today with recent Juju 2.0 from master and got the path wrong. The error message was misleading:

c@zeugmatic:~/src/kubs$ juju deploy /home/c/build/kubernetes --to 0
ERROR charm or bundle URL has invalid form: "/home/c/build/kubernetes"

Invalid? What'd I do wrong?

In fact, I had messed up the path, it was actually:

c@zeugmatic:~/src/kubs$ juju deploy /home/c/builds/kubernetes --to 0
Deploying charm "local:xenial/kubernetes-0".

So, if the path doesn't exist, you get a really misleading error message.

Is there a way we can tell the difference between:

- Local path, but the path doesn't exist
- Charmstore charm URLs that don't exist

Because the cs: prefix is optional, I'm not sure we can in all cases!

I think this is kind of a UX fail. Some suggestions:

- Require local charms to be deployed with --path, which would be nice and consistent with upgrade-charm. (Explicit rather than implicit, and consistent. I prefer this option.)
- Avoid deciding and just include this possibility in the above error message to say "invalid form or local charm not found"
- Bring back the local: charm URL prefix?
- Something else?

[Canonical Juju QA Bot (juju-qa-bot)]

This bug has not been updated in 5 years, so we're marking it Expired. If you believe this is incorrect, please update the status.