Users and models

This section is about understanding models with multiple users.

Adding models

When an administrator adds a model, by default, the cloud credentials used throughout the model will be those that the admin used to create the controller and the SSH keys copied across the model will be those of the controller model. The administrator can override these defaults with the appropriate command options.

The model creator becomes, by default, the model owner. However, the creation process does allow for owner designation.

Examples:

Add model 'mymodel' (in the current controller):

juju add-model mymodel

Add model 'mymodel' and designate user 'tron' as the owner:

juju add-model --owner=tron mymodel

See Adding a model for details on adding models.

Models and user access

An administrator can use the grant command to grant a user 'read', 'write', or 'admin' access to any model.

• read: A user can view the state of a model with the models, machines and status commands.
• write: In addition to 'read' abilities, a user can modify/configure models.
• admin: In addition to 'write' abilities, a user can backup models and connect to machines via the juju ssh command.

To give 'bob' read-only access to the model 'mymodel', for example, the administrator would enter the following:

juju grant bob read mymodel

To give 'jim' write access to the same model, the administrator would use the following:

juju grant jim write mymodel 

See Users for details on available commands.

Controller access

A controller is a special kind of model that acts as the management node for each cloud environment. Properly managed access to any controller is critical to the security and stability of your cloud and all its models.

In addition to the two levels of user access for models, three further levels of access are used to manage access to Juju's controllers:

• login: the standard access level for any user, enabling them to connect to a cloud and access any permitted models.
• add-model: in addition to login access, a user is also be permitted to add and remove new models.
• superuser: grants a user the same permissions as an administrator and complete control over the deployed environment.

The grant syntax for controller access is the same as model access, only without the need to specify a model. With no controller specified, the current controller will be assumed the target:

juju grant jim add-model

A controller can be specified using the --controller argument followed by the name of the controller:

juju grant jim add-model --controller admin-lxd

The users command can be used to list all users registered to a controller, along with their access levels. The output will look similar to the following:

Controller: admin-lxd

Name    Display name  Access     Date created  Last connection
admin*  admin         superuser  2016-11-14    just now
bob                   login      1 hour ago    58 minutes ago
jim                   add-model  2016-11-14    58 minutes ago

Controller access for external users

It is possible to give a user access to a controller without creating a local account for them. Linking the controller to the external identity manager, such as the Ubuntu SSO, in this way provides the benefit of convenience, as the authentication system used may also be used for other systems. This reduces the number of login credentials that users must remember across multiple systems.

To do this, these criteria must first be met:

• The user must already have an account on an external identity manager
• The controller must have been created (bootstrapped) using the identity configuration option, like here where we use the URL for the Ubuntu SSO and Juju: --config identity-url=https://api.jujucharms.com/identity
• The user must first log in to http://jujucharms.com at least once before attempting to log in to Juju as an external user
• The user must install Juju on the machine from which they will access the controller

On the controller, you grant Frances access to add models using:

juju grant frances@external addmodel

You can allow anyone with an Ubuntu SSO account to create models on this controller like this:

juju grant everyone@external addmodel

Sharing controller information must be done directly between the controller owner and the external user, such as via email, and manually adding the controller information to the local user's $HOME/.local/share/juju/controllers.yaml in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions and the similar location in other OSes.

The external user will log in from their machine with juju login -u <username>. They will be directed to the URL for the external identity provider so that they may log in there and then will be granted access to the controller.

For the external user to create models from the controller, they must have credentials for that provider, for example, GCE or AWS. Any models created by this user will use these credentials.

juju add-model test --credential gce

To learn more about credentials, see credentials.

Public controllers

The juju login command can also be used to access a public controller, using either the name or the host name of the controller as a parameter:

juju login jaas

The above command will add the 'jaas' public controller to the list of controllers you can use, caching its details in the locally stored controllers.yaml file.

Public controllers will normally use an external identity provider. JAAS, as used above, uses Ubuntu SSO, which means you should register with https://jujucharms.com/login.

Revoke access rights

The 'revoke' command is used to remove a user's access to either a model or a controller. To revoke 'add-model' controller access for user 'jim', you would use the following:

juju revoke jim add-model

After a revoke command has been issued, a user's access will reduce to the next lower access level. With the above example, user 'jim' would have have 'add-model' access reduced to 'login' access on the controller. This also means that if a user has write access to a model, the following command would revoke both read and write access:

juju revoke bob read mymodel