Deploy the kubernetes-vault helm chart on Rancher

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To deploy the Kubernetes-Vault Helm chart on a Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster, you need to follow these steps:

1. **Set up a Rancher-managed Kubernetes Cluster**: Before deploying the chart, you must have a Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher. Rancher simplifies the management of Kubernetes clusters across various infrastructures.

2. **Install Helm**: Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, which simplifies deployment of applications and services onto Kubernetes clusters.

3. **Add the Helm Chart Repository**: This is where the Kubernetes-Vault chart is stored.

4. **Deploy the Helm Chart with Pulumi**: Use Pulumi to script the deployment process of the Kubernetes-Vault Helm chart on your Rancher cluster.

We will use Pulumi with TypeScript to accomplish this task. Below is the Pulumi program that outlines these steps. This example assumes that you have a pre-provisioned Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher and also have appropriate kubeconfig for accessing this cluster.

First, let's install the required Pulumi packages with npm if you haven't done so:

```bash
npm install @pulumi/kubernetes @pulumi/rancher2
```

Now, the Pulumi TypeScript program to deploy the `kubernetes-vault` Helm chart:

```typescript
import * as k8s from "@pulumi/kubernetes";
import * as rancher2 from "@pulumi/rancher2";

// Create a new Pulumi Kubernetes provider to manage resources in the pre-provisioned Rancher Kubernetes cluster.
// Pulumi uses the kubeconfig to interact with the cluster, make sure your environment is properly set up for this.
// e.g. `export KUBECONFIG=path_to_your_kubeconfig`
const k8sProvider = new k8s.Provider("k8s-provider", {});

// Helm chart repositories generally publish a set of Helm charts that can be deployed to Kubernetes clusters.
// One could be, for example: `https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami` which hosts various Helm charts.

// In this line, we are adding the Helm repository for Kubernetes-Vault. You need to replace `REPO_URL` with
// the actual URL of the Kubernetes-Vault Helm chart repository.
const vaultRepo = "REPO_URL"; // Placeholder for the Kubernetes-Vault Helm chart repository URL.

// The following code deploys the Kubernetes-Vault Helm chart on the cluster referenced by k8sProvider.
const vaultChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart("kubernetes-vault", {
    // You'll need to specify the actual chart name and version here.
    chart: "vault-chart-name", // Placeholder for the chart name.
    version: "vault-chart-version", // Placeholder for the chart version.
    fetchOpts: {
        // Equivalent to `helm repo add` command. Sets the repository URL for the Helm chart.
        repo: vaultRepo,
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// The output that can be used to interact with the Helm deployment, such as getting the status or endpoints.
export const vaultStatus = vaultChart.status;

```

Replace `REPO_URL` with the actual repository URL, `vault-chart-name` with the actual chart name, and `vault-chart-version` with the version of the Kubernetes-Vault Helm chart you want to deploy. Ensure that you have configured your `KUBECONFIG` environment variable to point to your Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster.

When you run `pulumi up`, this program will instruct Pulumi to deploy the specified Helm chart to your cluster.

This script is the entirety of what's needed to use Pulumi to deploy an application on Kubernetes via Helm. The use of Pulumi's TypeScript SDK allows you to easily integrate this into more comprehensive automation scripts that might also handle cloud resource provisioning, monitoring setup, etc.