juju unable to deploy a local charm with absolute symlinks in charm directory

[James Page]

juju version: 2.5.0

The OpenStack charms make fairly extensive use of tox for linting, unit and functional testing of charms; this results in a .tox directory with lots of temporary state including symlinks to python binaries on the hosting system.

Juju rejects these and won't use the charm if found:

ERROR cannot deploy bundle: cannot repackage charm: symlink ".tox/func/include/python3.6m" is absolute: "/usr/include/python3.6m"

It would be nice if juju could deal with this better or at least provide the ability to .jujuignore certain files/directories within the charm if found.

[Richard Harding (rharding)]

The objective here is to add support for a .jujuignore file format in charms that would not be deployed as part of the application.

[Achilleas Anagnostopoulos (achilleasa)]

The current edge snap contains our proposal for addressing this issue by means of a .jujuignore file (uses same syntax as .gitignore files). For more information on the supported patterns please refer to the extended commit log here: https://github.com/juju/charm/pull/271/commits/2ed83967f1668fae235d9a4dbb610ee63532f735

When packaging a charm we start with a set of sane defaults for excluding vcs-related dirs and some internal-/build-related files (for the full list see: https://github.com/juju/charm/blob/v6/charmdir.go#L28-L39). Then we look for a .jujuignore file at the root of the charm dir and if one is provided we append its contents to the exclusion list.

By updating our charm templates to include a .jujuignore file we can easily exclude things like additional template-specific build directories and/or things like the absolute links that break deployments.

We would appreciate some feedback on this solution so we can back-port it to the 2.5 branch.

[Achilleas Anagnostopoulos (achilleasa)]

This fix was back-ported and released with 2.5.3