Resources

A resource is an additional or some additional content that a charm can make use of, or may require to run. This can be especially useful where you need to include large blobs (perhaps a database, media file or otherwise) that may not need to be updated with the same cadence as the charm or workload itself. By keeping resources separate, you can control the lifecycle of these elements more carefully, and in some situations avoid the need for repeatedly downloading large files from Charmhub during routine upgrades/maintenance.

Defining resources

Resources are defined in a charm’s metadata.yaml and are therefore intrinsically linked to a charm. Because of this, there is no need to register them separately in Charmhub. Other charms may have resources with the same name, but this is not a problem; references to resources always contain the charm name and resource name.

Similarly with storage, resources is defined as a top-level YAML map, where each key in the map is the name of a resource, that can map to the following fields:

An example resource definition:

# ...
resources:
  someresource:
    type: file
    filename: superdb.bin
    description: the DB with needed info
  app-image:
    type: oci-image
    description: OCI image for app
# ...

Accessing resources from the charm

In order to make use of file resources in a charm, the Charmed Operator Framework provides a helper method to fetch the path of a file resource. Consider this simple resource definition:

resources:
  my-resource:
    type: file
    filename: somefile.txt
    description: test resource

In the charm code, we can now use Model.resources.fetch(<resource_name>) to get the path to the resource, then manipulate it as we need:

# ...
from ops.model import ModelError, BlockedStatus
# ...

def _on_config_changed(self, event):
    # Get the path to the file resource named 'my-resource'
    try:
        resource_path = self.model.resources.fetch("my-resource")
    except ModelError:
        self.unit.status = BlockedStatus("Missing 'my-resource' resource")
        return

    # Open the file and read it
    with open(resource_path, "r") as f:
        content = f.read()
    # do something

The fetch() method will raise a ModelError if the resource does not exist, and returns a Python Path object to the resource if it does.

Last updated 2 months ago.