juju deployment error on manually provisioned machine

Question

I am getting the following error, when I try to deploy a service on a manually provisioned machine using juju:

juju deploy juju-gui --show-log
2014-05-20 13:42:31 INFO juju.cmd supercommand.go:302 running juju-1.18.3-unknown-amd64 [gc]
2014-05-20 13:42:31 INFO juju api.go:242 connecting to API addresses [j93716.servers.jiffybox.net:17070]
2014-05-20 13:42:31 INFO juju apiclient.go:114 state/api: dialing "wss://xxx.xxx.net:17070/"
2014-05-20 13:42:31 INFO juju apiclient.go:124 state/api: connection established
Added charm "cs:trusty/juju-gui-2" to the environment.
2014-05-20 13:42:46 ERROR juju.cmd supercommand.go:305 cannot assign unit "juju-gui/0" to machine: cannot assign unit "juju-gui/0" to new machine or container: cannot assign unit "juju-gui/0" to new machine: use "juju add-machine ssh:[user@]<host>" to provision machines

juju status outputs the following:

environment: manual
machines:
  "0":
    agent-state: started
    agent-version: 1.18.3
    dns-name: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
    instance-id: 'manual:'
    series: precise
    hardware: arch=amd64 cpu-cores=1 mem=1996M
  "1":
    agent-state: started
    agent-version: 1.18.3
    dns-name: xxx.xxx.xxx.yyy
    instance-id: manual:xxx.xxx.xxx.net
    series: precise
    hardware: arch=amd64 cpu-cores=1 mem=1996M
services:
  juju-gui:
    charm: cs:trusty/juju-gui-2
    exposed: true
    units:
      juju-gui/0:
        agent-state: pending

Did I miss something?

Answer 1

Judging by the juju status output, you've bootstrapped a manual environment (using juju bootstrap, which is different from manual provisioning, done using juju add-machine ssh:[user@]host).

Manual environments are special - they consist only of a single machine and it cannot start or stop additional machines automatically, including on juju deploy. To add another machine, use juju add-machine ssh:[user@]host first, then juju deploy juju-gui --to #, where # is the juju machine id of the machine you've just added (run juju status to see it). You can also use juju deploy juju-gui --to 0 to deploy Juju GUI on the bootstrap machine.

juju add-machine ssh:[user@]host can be used in any bootstrapped environment to manually provision an external machine and add it to the environment. But with a manually bootstrapped environment, that's the only way to add machines, and you have to specify placement for services and units when deploying, with --to <machine-id> explicitly.

I hope that clears up any confusion. We definitely need better documentation on that I suppose.