Some Juju CLI usability thoughts before we close 2.0

[Ian Booth]

A few things have been irking me with some aspects of Juju's CLI. Here's a few
thoughts from a user perspective (well, me as user, YMMV).

The following pain points mainly revolve around commands that operate on a
controller rather than a model.

eg

$ juju login [-c controllername] fred
$ juju logout [-c controllername]

I really think the -c arg is not that natural here.

$ juju login controllername fred
$ juju logout controllername

seem a lot more natural and also explicit, because....
I know without args, the "current" controller will be used...
but it's not in your face what that is without running list-controllers first,
and so it's too easy to logout of the wrong controller accidentally. Having
positional args solves that.

The same would then apply to other controller commands, like eg add-model

$ juju add-model mycontroller mymodel

One thing that might be an issue for people is if they only have one controller,
then

$ juju logout
or
$ juju add-model

would just work and requiring a controller name is more typing.

But 2 points there:
1. as we move forward, people reasonably have more than one controller on the go
at any time, and being explicit about what controller you are wanting to use is
a good thing
2. in the one controller case, we could simply make the controller name optional
so juju logout just works

We already use a positional arg for destroy-controller - it just seems natural
to do it everywhere for all controller commands.

Anyways, I'd like to see what others think, mine is just the perspective of one
user. I'd be happy to do a snap and put it out there to get feedback.

--

Another issue - I would really, really like a "juju whoami" command. We used to
use juju switch-user without args for that, but now it's gone.

When you are staring at a command prompt and you know you have several
controllers and different logins active, I really want to just go:

$ juju whoami
Currently active as fred at controller2

Just to get a quick reminder of what controller I am operating on and who I am
logged in as on the controller.  I know we have a way of doing that via list
controllers, but if there's a few, or even if not, you still need to scan your
eyes down a table and look for the one wit the * to see the current one and then
scan across and get see the user etc. It's all a lot harder than just a whoami
command IMO.

-- 

We will need a juju shares command to show who has access to a controller, now
that we have controller permissions login, addmodel, superuser.

For models, we support:

$ juju shares -m model
$ juju shares (for the default model)

What do we want for controller shares?

$ juju shares-controller  ?

which would support positional arg

$ juju shares-controller mycontroller   ?

--

On the subject of shares, the shares command shows all users with access to a
model (or soon a controller as per above). That's great for admins to see who
they are sharing their stuff with. What I'd like as a user is a command to tell
me what level of access I have to various controllers and models. I'd like this
in list-controllers and list-models.

$ juju list-controllers

CONTROLLER       MODEL    USER         CLOUD/REGION   ACCESS
fredcontroller*  foo      fred at local                  addmodel
ian              default  admin at local  lxd/localhost  superuser

$ juju list-models

MODEL  OWNER       STATUS     ACCESS  LAST CONNECTION
foo*   fred at local  available  write   5 minutes ago

The above would make it much easier to see if I could add a model or deploy an
application etc. And I don't get to see who else has access like with juju
shares, just my own access levels. Thoughts?