Deploy the docker-registry-proxy helm chart on Rancher

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Deploying a Helm chart on a Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher requires a few steps. First, you need to ensure that you have access to a Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster. If you don't have a cluster already set up, you will need to create one, which can be done using the rancher2.Cluster resource from the Rancher2 Pulumi provider.

For the goal of deploying a Helm chart, assuming you have a running Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher, you would typically perform the following tasks:

Ensure you have access to the cluster, possibly by obtaining the appropriate kubeconfig file.
Add the Helm chart repository, if it isn't already part of your Helm configuration.
Use a Pulumi script to deploy the Helm chart to the cluster.

For a more specific guide, we also need to take Helm's requirements into account. Helm requires a kubeconfig file to communicate with the Kubernetes cluster. In a Pulumi program, this is typically set using the kubernetes provider's kubeconfig input property.

Let's look at a generic Pulumi TypeScript program that illustrates these tasks:

import * as pulumi from "@pulumi/pulumi";
import * as kubernetes from "@pulumi/kubernetes";
import * as rancher2 from "@pulumi/rancher2";

// Initialize a Kubernetes provider instance using the kubeconfig obtained from a Rancher-managed cluster.
const k8sProvider = new kubernetes.Provider("k8s-provider", {
    kubeconfig: "<YOUR_KUBECONFIG_HERE>", // Replace with your kubeconfig contents or path
});

// Deploy the docker-registry-proxy Helm chart using the Helm Release resource from the Kubernetes provider.
const dockerRegistryProxyChart = new kubernetes.helm.v3.Release("docker-registry-proxy", {
    chart: "docker-registry-proxy",
    version: "<CHART_VERSION>", // Specify the chart version you want to deploy, e.g., "0.3.0"
    repositoryOpts: {
        repo: "https://helm-repo-url", // Replace with the actual repository URL
    },
    values: {
        // Specify any custom configuration needed for the docker-registry-proxy Helm chart
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// Export the Helm chart deployment's name.
export const helmReleaseName = dockerRegistryProxyChart.status.name;

This program initializes a Kubernetes provider with kubeconfig provided by you, which should be the configuration that allows Pulumi to interact with your Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster. Replace "<YOUR_KUBECONFIG_HERE>" with your actual kubeconfig and "<CHART_VERSION>" with the version number of the docker-registry-proxy chart you wish to deploy.

The kubernetes.helm.v3.Release resource is used to deploy the Helm chart to the Kubernetes cluster. You must specify the chart version and the repository URL where the chart can be found.

This script doesn't include the Helm repository addition, as that's typically done outside of a Pulumi program using the helm repo add command. However, you can specify the repository options directly in the Release resource, as shown.

In a more dynamic setting, where you want Pulumi to manage the entire lifecycle of your cluster as well, you would include the creation and configuration of a Rancher cluster in your Pulumi program using the rancher2.Cluster resource, but that's beyond the scope of this example.

After creating this Pulumi program, you would run it using the Pulumi CLI to perform the deployment. Make sure to have Pulumi installed on your system and properly configured to use your chosen cloud provider. The Helm chart would then be deployed to your Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster using the configuration specified in the values object.