Deploy the rclone-cache helm chart on Linode Kubernetes Engine

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Deploying a Helm chart on a Kubernetes cluster involves several steps. First, you'll need a Kubernetes cluster; since you specified Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE), I will show you how to create a cluster on Linode and then install a Helm chart.

The following code uses Pulumi with TypeScript to perform the following steps:

Create a new Kubernetes cluster on Linode.
Deploy the rclone-cache Helm chart onto this Kubernetes cluster.

To accomplish these tasks, we use the linode and kubernetes providers from Pulumi. The linode.LkeCluster resource creates a new cluster on LKE, and the kubernetes.helm.v3.Chart resource from the Kubernetes provider deploys a Helm chart onto a Kubernetes cluster.

Before you begin, you'll need to set up Pulumi and your Linode API token. You would typically install the Pulumi CLI, log in to the Pulumi service, and set the Linode API token as an environment variable or through Pulumi configuration.

Here is the Pulumi program that creates the Kubernetes cluster and deploys the rclone-cache Helm chart:

import * as pulumi from "@pulumi/pulumi";
import * as linode from "@pulumi/linode";
import * as k8s from "@pulumi/kubernetes";

// Create a new Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) cluster
const cluster = new linode.LkeCluster("my-cluster", {
    label: "my-cluster",
    k8sVersion: "1.21", // Replace with the desired Kubernetes version
    region: "us-central", // Replace with the desired Linode region
    pool: [{
        count: 3, // Number of nodes in the node pool
        type: "g7-standard-2", // Replace with the desired node type
    }],
});

// Generate a kubeconfig for the new LKE cluster
const kubeconfig = pulumi.all([cluster.id, cluster.kubeconfig]).apply(([_, kubeconfig]) => {
    return pulumi.secret(kubeconfig.rawConfig);
});

// Create a new Pulumi Kubernetes provider with the kubeconfig
const k8sProvider = new k8s.Provider("k8s", { kubeconfig });

// Deploy the rclone-cache Helm chart onto the LKE cluster
const rcloneChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart("rclone-cache", {
    chart: "rclone-cache", // The name of the chart
    version: "1.0.0", // Replace with the desired chart version
    fetchOpts: {
        repo: "http://<helm-chart-repo-url>", // Replace with the URL of the Helm chart repository
    },
    // Add any custom values for the Helm chart below
    values: {
        /* exampleValue: "example" */
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// Export the cluster's kubeconfig
export const kubeconfigOutput = kubeconfig;

In this program:

Replace <helm-chart-repo-url> with the actual Helm chart repository URL where the rclone-cache chart is hosted.
Replace 1.21 and us-central with the desired Kubernetes version and Linode region, respectively.
Similarly, replace g7-standard-2 with the desired node type.
Under the values key in the rcloneChart resource, you can define any custom values that you wish to provide to the rclone-cache Helm chart.

The kubeconfig is marked as a secret because it contains sensitive credentials for accessing the Kubernetes cluster. The Pulumi program will create a new Kubernetes provider instance (k8sProvider) using this kubeconfig, which is then used to deploy the Helm chart.

After defining these resources in Pulumi, running pulumi up will provision the resources in your Linode account. Remember, you need to have the Pulumi CLI installed and configured to interact with the Linode API.

Once the deployment is complete, you can interact with your cluster using kubectl by setting the KUBECONFIG environment variable to the outputted kubeconfig or by using it directly from the Pulumi stack output.