Charts and resources

How do I add a chart?

To add a new chart add to the helmfiles/mynamespace/helmfile.yaml file follow the add chart guide.

How do I customise an App in an Environment?

We use helmfile to configure helm charts whether its in the dev, staging or production environment and whether you are using multiple clusters.

See how to customise a chart

For a given namespace called ns there is a folder in the cluster git repository at:

helmfiles/ns/

which contains the helmfile.yaml file to configure all the charts for that namespace.

To override the environment configuration for the namespace ns you can create your own values.yaml file in this folder (or values.yaml.gotmpl if you want to use go templating inside it).

If the configuration only applies to a single chart you could prefix the file with the chart name.

So create helmfiles/ns/mychart-values.yaml and put whatever environment specific configuration changes you need for your helm chart.

To set a custom environment variable try a helmfiles/ns/mychart-values.yaml file of something like:

env:
  MY_ENV: someValue

Then you need to reference this YAML file in the releases: section in the helmfiles/ns/helmfile.yaml.

e.g. your helmfiles/ns/helmfile.yaml should look something like this - see the new mychart-values.yaml entry in the releases.values section for mychart:

filepath: ""
environments:
  default:
    values:
      - jx-values.yaml
namespace: jx-staging
repositories:
  - name: dev
    url: http://chartmuseum-$mydomain/
releases:
  - chart: dev/mychart
    version: 0.0.12
    name: mychart
    values:
      - jx-values.yaml
      - mychart-values.yaml
templates: {}
renderedvalues: {}

How do I use a chart from a secure repository

Some chart repositories need a username and password to access them.

So to access those chart repositories you can the username and password into the helmfile.yaml

However the username/passwords are probably secret. So you can create a kubernetes Secret called jx-boot-job-env-vars which is automatically used in the boot Job

e.g.

# lets make sure we are in the jx-git-operator namespace
jx ns jx-git-operator

kubectl create secret generic jx-boot-job-env-vars \
  --from-literal=MYREPO_USERNAME=someuser \
  --from-literal=MYREPO_PASSWORD='S!B\*d$zDsb='

Any environment variables defined in the jx-boot-job-env-vars Secret can then be used in your helmfile.yaml as follows:

repositories:
  - name: myrepo
    url: https://something.com
    username: '{{ requiredEnv "MYREPO_USERNAME" }}'
    password: '{{ requiredEnv "MYREPO_PASSWORD" }}'
releases:
  - chart: myrepo/mychart
    name: mychart
    version: 1.2.3

How do I add a kubernetes resource?

To add a new kubernetes resource follow the add resources guide.

The default helmfile.yaml files take references to helm charts.

If you want to deploy one or more kubernetes resources wrap them in a local chart in your dev cluster git repository

How do I deploy an app with no chart?

Some microservices on kubernetes do not yet come packaged as a helm chart.

e.g. if the only instructions on the website of the microservice is something like

# install this appication via:
kubectl apply -f https://acme.com/foo.yaml

If you want you can just install it like the above kubectl apply command.

Though you then lose the benefits of GitOps in that all changes to your cluster are auditted and versioned in git and it’s easy to rollback changes.

So another approach is to follow the create a local chart instructions:

mkdir charts/myname/templates
curl -L https://acme.com/foo.yaml > charts/myname/templates/resources.yaml
echo "apiVersion: v1
description: A Helm chart for myname
name: myname
version: 0.0.1" > charts/myname/Chart.yaml

Then add the following chart: line to your helmfiles/$namespace/helmfile.yaml in the releases: section for the namespace you want to deploy it in…

releases:
  - chart: ../../charts/myname
    name: myname

If this is a brand new namespace which didn’t have a helmfiles/$namespace/helmfile.yaml then make sure you also add an entry in the root helmfile.yaml file of:

helmfiles:
  - path: helmfiles/$namespace/helmfile.yaml

Note that $namespace in the above files should be expanded to the actual namespace you are deploying it to; e.g. jx or jx-staging or whatever.

The above may seem like a bit of work compared to kubectl apply but it does mean at any time you can upgrade the app by re-running the command:

curl -L https://acme.com/foo.yaml > charts/myname/templates/resources.yaml

You can also easily uninstall the application or modify the YAML in git at any time.

How do I add a database?

If you are building a new microservice that needs a database there’s a few ways to do it.

If your microservice has its own database that is not used by any other microservices you can create a nested chart add it to the Chart.yaml dependencies section as described here. Though that can be confusing as you now need to configure the dependent chart by wrapping its configuration in a YAML key (e.g. the release name you picked or maybe the chart name) which can be confusing - particularly if someone wants to configure your database differently in a separate environment

So we recommend you avoid nested charts and just add your dependent charts to your preview/helmfile.yaml for Preview Environments and add it to the staging and production environments so they can all be configured in the same way via helmfile configuration usually via adding a custom values.yaml file and adding it into the releases section

How do I annotate a namespace?

For permanent environments like Dev, Staging or Production you can add the annotated Namespace resource into a chart

For Preview Environments you can add the kubectl annotate ns foo step into a helmfile hook in the preview/helmfile.yaml

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