On-Premises

NOTE

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On-Premises Kubernetes

If you are using kubernetes we highly recommend you use one of the managed cloud providers as this comes with lots of additional features like:

• container registries and bucket storage
• IAM and workload identity (e.g. so kubernetes Service Accounts can be assigned roles to be able to read/write to certain buckets or container registries)

However sometimes you need to run kubernetes on your premises. Longer term we hope the cloud providers can run their managed kubernetes and associated infrastructure on your premises too so you get to reuse the same storage + IAM anywhere. But until then, this guide is intended to get you started installing Jenkins X on a vanilla kubernetes cluster on-premises.

Prerequisites

The following are the prerequisites of your on-premises kubernetes cluster:

• Download and install the jx 3.x binary

Kubernetes cluster

We obviously need a working kubernetes cluster. There are many approaches to setting up on-premises clusters obviously the easiest approach is to use the cloud.

kubectl access

You need to be able to connect to your kubernetes cluster via kubectl so that you can run commands like:

kubectl get ns
kubectl get node

To view the namespaces and nodes respectively.

Ingress

To use Jenkins X we need ingress to work. This means being able to create a kubernetes Ingress resource with a domain name which can be resolved outside of kubernetes to network into kubernetes services.

Jenkins X installs nginx which has a LoadBalancer kubernetes Service to implement ingress. But the underlying kubernetes platform needs to implement the load balancing network and infrastructure. This comes out of the box on all public clouds.

With an on-premises kubernetes cluster you need to install something like MetalLB

If you are on bare metal you could try these instructions

Storage

We need your kubernetes cluster to have a default storage class so that PersistentVolumeClaim resources in helm charts get resolved to PersistentVolume resources so that persistent disks can be used.

You may find these instructions useful

Getting Started

This is our current recommended quickstart for on-premises kubernetes:

• Create the cluster Git Repository based on the jx3-gitops-repositories/jx3-kubernetes template

  • if the above button does not work then please Login to GitHub first and then retry the button

• git clone the new repository via HTTPS and cd into the git clone directory

• find out what your ingress domain is for your cluster then modify the jx-requirements.yml file and modify the ingress.domain section…

cluster:
---
ingress:
  domain: mydomain.com

• verify your cluster does not already have an nginx installation. If it does then please remove the nginx line from your helmfile.yaml file and remove the helmfiles/nginx files. If you are using a custom nginx installation then you will need to figure out your domain by hand and won’t be able to let Jenkins X detect the load balancer IP from its included nginx installation.

• git add, commit and push your changes:

git add *
git commit -a -m "fix: added domain"
git push origin main

• ensure you are connected to your cluster so you can run the following kubectl commands

kubectl get ns
kubectl get node

• Install the git operator from inside a git clone of the git repository you created above.

• switch to the jx namespace

jx ns jx

• Create or import projects

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