What does Service: storm has neither charm url or branch specified mean?

Question

When deploying a bundle using juju-deployer it constantly says Service: NAME has neither charm url or branch specified. The charm deploys correctly, but I'm curious about what the message means?

"storm-slavecluster":
  charm: "local:trusty/storm"
  num_units: 1
  annotations: 
    "gui-x": "800"
    "gui-y": "800"

$JUJU_REPOSITORY points to my local repository

Answer 1

The bundle is referencing a local charm. Denoted by the local in local:trusty/storm. The message - while not immediately obvious - was correct. There was no branch (deploying from VCS like bazaar), nor was there a charm-store url specified (eg: charm: cs:trusty/hdp-storm)

Working with local charms in a bundle

There's an assumption in the juju tooling that this charm should reside within $JUJU_REPOSITORY - and is a common bash export when working with charms that only reside locally. You can set this with a one-liner in bash

export JUJU_REPOSITORY=/path/to/charms

in my case, this is set to $HOME/charms

and the actual storm charm resides in $HOME/charms/trusty/storm (referencing the bundle format above - i do beleive we only have hdp-storm in the charm store)

Updating the bundle to use store-charms

What might be a better option if you're not working with a locally modified storm charm would be to update the bundle to point at the charm store copy which resides here