Charmed PostgreSQL VM Tutorial > 1. Set up the environment

Deploy Charmed PostgreSQL VM

In this section, you will deploy Charmed PostgreSQL VM, access the units hosting this charm, and interact with the PostgreSQL databases that exist inside the application.

Deploy

To deploy Charmed PostgreSQL, all you need to do is run

juju deploy postgresql --channel 14/stable

Juju will now fetch Charmed PostgreSQL VM from Charmhub and deploy it to the LXD cloud. This process can take several minutes depending on how provisioned (RAM, CPU, etc) your machine is.

You can track the progress by running:

juju status --watch 1s

This command is useful for checking the real-time information about the state of a charm and the machines hosting it. Check the juju status documentation for more information about its usage.

When the application is ready, juju status will show something similar to the sample output below:

Model     Controller  Cloud/Region         Version  SLA          Timestamp
tutorial  overlord    localhost/localhost  3.1.7    unsupported  09:41:53+01:00

App         Version  Status  Scale  Charm       Channel    Rev  Exposed  Message
postgresql           active      1  postgresql  14/stable  281  no       

Unit           Workload  Agent  Machine  Public address  Ports  Message
postgresql/0*  active    idle   0        10.89.49.129           

Machine  State    Address       Inst id        Series  AZ  Message
0        started  10.89.49.129  juju-a8a31d-0  jammy       Running

You can also watch juju logs with the juju debug-log command. More info on logging in the juju logs documentation.

Access PostgreSQL

Connecting to the database requires that you know the values for host, username and password.

To retrieve these values, run the Charmed PostgreSQL action get-password:

juju run postgresql/leader get-password

Running the command above should output:

unit-postgresql-0:
  UnitId: postgresql/0
  id: "2"
  results:
    operator-password: <password>
  status: completed
  timing:
    completed: 2023-03-20 08:42:22 +0000 UTC
    enqueued: 2023-03-20 08:42:19 +0000 UTC
    started: 2023-03-20 08:42:21 +0000 UTC

To request a password for a different user, use the option username:

juju run postgresql/leader get-password username=replication

The IP address of the unit hosting the PostgreSQL application, also referred to as the “host”, can be found with juju status:

...
Unit           Workload  Agent  Machine  Public address  Ports  Message
postgresql/0*  active    idle   0        10.89.49.129       
...

To access the units hosting Charmed PostgreSQL run

juju ssh postgresql/leader

The easiest way to access PostgreSQL is via the PostgreSQL interactive terminal psql, which is already installed here.

To list all available databases, run:

psql --host=10.89.49.129 --username=operator --password --list

When requested, enter the <password> for charm user operator that you obtained earlier.

Example output:

                              List of databases
   Name    |  Owner   | Encoding | Collate |  Ctype  |   Access privileges   
-----------+----------+----------+---------+---------+-----------------------
 postgres  | operator | UTF8     | C.UTF-8 | C.UTF-8 | 
 template0 | operator | UTF8     | C.UTF-8 | C.UTF-8 | =c/operator          +
           |          |          |         |         | operator=CTc/operator
 template1 | operator | UTF8     | C.UTF-8 | C.UTF-8 | =c/operator          +
           |          |          |         |         | operator=CTc/operator
(3 rows)

You can now interact with PostgreSQL directly using PostgreSQL SQL Queries. For example, entering SELECT version(); should output something like:

> psql --host=10.89.49.129 --username=operator --password postgres
Password: 
psql (14.7 (Ubuntu 14.7-0ubuntu0.22.04.1))
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# SELECT version();
                                                               version                                                                
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 PostgreSQL 14.7 (Ubuntu 14.7-0ubuntu0.22.04.1) on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (Ubuntu 11.3.0-1ubuntu1~22.04) 11.3.0, 64-bit
(1 row)

Feel free to test out any other PostgreSQL queries.

When you’re ready to leave the PostgreSQL shell, you can just type exit. This will take you back to the host of Charmed PostgreSQL K8s (postgresql-k8s/0). Exit this host by once again typing exit. Now you will be in your original shell where you first started the tutorial. Here you can interact with Juju and LXD.