Exposing applications

By design, Juju operates a very secure environment for deploying your applications. Even if you have deployed applications, they won't be publicly available unless you explicitly make them so. To allow public access to applications, the appropriate changes must be made to the cloud provider firewall settings. As the procedure for doing this varies depending on your cloud, Juju helpfully abstracts this into a single command, juju expose <applicationname>.

For example, you may have deployed a WordPress application using the relevant charm. Once deployed, the application still cannot be accessed by the public, so you would run:

juju expose wordpress

Juju will then take the steps necessary to adjust firewall rules and any other settings to expose the application via its given address. This process may take anything from a few moments to several minutes. You can check on the current status of your applications by running:

juju status

This will return a status report similar to:

Model    Controller  Cloud/Region     Version  SLA
default  gce-test    google/us-east1  2.3.1    unsupported

App        Version  Status  Scale  Charm      Store       Rev  OS      Notes
mariadb    10.1.30  active      1  mariadb    jujucharms    7  ubuntu
wordpress           active      1  wordpress  jujucharms    5  ubuntu  exposed

Unit          Workload  Agent  Machine  Public address  Ports   Message
mariadb/0*    active    idle   1        35.196.102.182          ready
wordpress/0*  active    idle   0        35.227.27.40    80/tcp

Machine  State    DNS             Inst id        Series  AZ          Message
0        started  35.227.27.40    juju-5b2986-0  trusty  us-east1-b  RUNNING
1        started  35.196.102.182  juju-5b2986-1  trusty  us-east1-c  RUNNING

Relation provider       Requirer                Interface     Type  Message
mariadb:cluster         mariadb:cluster         mysql-ha      peer
wordpress:loadbalancer  wordpress:loadbalancer  reversenginx  peer

As you can see in the above example, the wordpress app is marked as 'exposed' in the Notes column, meaning that the application is running and available to users via its public address of 35.227.27.40.

Note: Exposing the application does not change any DNS or other settings which may be necessary to get your application running as you expect.

Unexposing an application

To return the firewall settings and make an application non-public again, you simply need to run the unexpose command. For example:

juju unexpose wordpress