Apps

What are Apps

Jenkins X Apps are distributed as Helm Charts via Helm Chart repositories. Any Helm chart can be installed as an app using jx add app, although Jenkins X adds various capabilities to Helm Charts including:

• the ability to interactively ask questions to generate values.yaml based on JSON Schema
• the ability to create pull requests against the GitOps repo that manages your team/cluster
• the ability to store secrets in vault
• the ability to upgrade all apps to the latest version

Planned features include:

• integrating kustomize to allow existing charts to be modified
• storing Helm repository credentials in vault
• taking existing values.yaml as defaults when asking questions based on JSON Schema during app upgrade
• only asking new questions during app upgrade
• integration for bash completion

Official Apps repositry

Jenkins X provides a lot Apps like: Gloo, Istio, Kubeless and more in https://github.com/jenkins-x-apps.

CLI Commands

• jx add app - Adds an app to Jenkins X
• jx delete app - Deletes one or more apps from Jenkins X
• jx get apps - Display one or more installed apps
• jx upgrade apps - Upgrades one or more apps to a newer release

Structure of an App chart

In addition to the structure of a regular helm chart a Jenkins X App chart contains the following:

• values.schema.yaml: a JSON schema extended with conditions, field values and questions that is used to point out and prompt the user for customizable values the app should be installed with.
• templates/app.yaml: a Jenkins X App custom resource: allows to define a values.schema.yaml transformation which can be used to inject cluster-specific values as for instance its domain and TLS settings (which can be obtained by mounting the ConfigMap ingress-config).

When jx add app is called the corresponding helm chart is fetched, its values.schema.yaml transformed using the App resource and the user prompted for the contained questions (non-const fields). From the user’s answers a values.yaml is generated and used to install the chart.

How to test local App chart changes

You can build your app chart locally, upload it in your cluster’s chart repository and call jx add app referencing your uploaded chart. This can be done as follows from within your chart’s directory:

CHART_NAME=<YOUR_APP_NAME>
CHART_VERSION=<YOUR_APP_VERSION>
CHART_REPO=<YOUR_CHART_REPO_URL> # listed by `jx get urls`
CHART_REPO_USR=<YOUR_USERNAME>
CHART_REPO_PSW=<YOUR_PASSWORD>
helm init --client-only
helm repo add <DEP_REPO_NAME> <DEP_REPO_URL> # required if dependencies need to be loaded
helm dependency build
sed "s/version: .*/version: $CHART_VERSION/g" -i Chart.yaml # set the app's current version
helm lint .
helm package .
curl --fail -u "$CHART_REPO_USR:$CHART_REPO_PSW" --data-binary "@${CHART_NAME}-${CHART_VERSION}.tgz" ${CHART_REPO}/api/charts
jx add app --repository $CHART_REPO --version $CHART_VERSION $CHART_NAME

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