Deploy the variant-ui helm chart on Digital Ocean Kubernetes Service

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To deploy a Helm chart to a Kubernetes cluster on Digital Ocean using Pulumi, you'll need to do a few things:

1. Setup a Kubernetes cluster on Digital Ocean.
2. Install the Helm CLI tool locally.
3. Use Pulumi's Kubernetes provider to create a Helm chart resource in your Pulumi program.

First, ensure you have Pulumi installed and configured with access to your Digital Ocean account. You also need to have `kubectl` and Helm set up on your machine to interact with Kubernetes clusters and manage Helm charts.

The Pulumi program below is written in TypeScript. It sets up a Digital Ocean Kubernetes cluster and subsequently deploys the `variant-ui` Helm chart.

We'll be using `@pulumi/digitalocean` to create a Kubernetes cluster and `@pulumi/kubernetes` to deploy the Helm Chart to the cluster.

Here's how you can accomplish the task, step by step:

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

// Step 1: Create a new DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster
const cluster = new digitalocean.KubernetesCluster("do-cluster", {
    // Specify the region for the cluster
    region: digitalocean.Regions.NYC1,
    // Specify the version of Kubernetes
    version: "1.21.5-do.0",
    // Define the node pool
    nodePool: {
        size: digitalocean.DropletSlugs.DropletS2VCPU2GB,
        name: "default-pool",
        nodeCount: 2,
    },
});

// Step 2: Use the DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster as our provider
const k8sProvider = new kubernetes.Provider("do-k8s", {
    kubeconfig: cluster.kubeConfigs[0].rawConfig,
});

// Step 3: Deploy the variant-ui Helm chart on the cluster
const chart = new kubernetes.helm.v3.Chart("variant-ui-chart", {
    chart: "variant-ui",
    version: "1.0.0", // Replace with the specific chart version you need
    // If the chart is not from the stable Helm chart repository
    // you may need to specify the repository URL.
    fetchOpts: {
        repo: "https://charts.example.com/", // Put the URL of your Helm chart repository here
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// Output the kubeconfig to connect to the cluster with kubectl
export const kubeconfig = cluster.kubeConfigs[0].rawConfig;

// After running `pulumi up`, you can interact with the cluster using `kubectl` as follows:
// $ pulumi stack output kubeconfig > kubeconfig.yaml
// $ KUBECONFIG=./kubeconfig.yaml kubectl get po -A
```

A detailed breakdown of this program:

1. We import the Pulumi packages needed to interact with DigitalOcean and Kubernetes.
2. We create a Kubernetes cluster on DigitalOcean using the `KubernetesCluster` resource. We specify the region, Kubernetes version, and the node pool configuration for this cluster.
3. We use the `kubeConfigs` property of the created cluster to provide the `kubeconfig` to the Kubernetes provider instance, necessary for Pulumi to interact with our cluster.
4. We set up the `Chart` resource, which represents the Helm chart we want to deploy. Here you specify the chart name, version, and repository.
5. We export the `kubeconfig` so that you can use `kubectl` to interact with your Kubernetes cluster outside of Pulumi.

To run this Pulumi program, save it to a file (e.g., `index.ts`), and ensure you have the Pulumi project set up. Then, run `pulumi up`. If you need more information on setting up a Pulumi project, visit the [Pulumi documentation](https://www.pulumi.com/docs/get-started/kubernetes/).

Keep in mind you'll need to replace `"https://charts.example.com/"` with the actual repository URL where the `variant-ui` Helm chart is located. If the Helm chart is on a public repository included in Helm's default repositories, you can omit the `fetchOpts` entirely. You'll also want to ensure you use the correct chart and version name.