Deploy the retroarch-web helm chart on Linode Kubernetes Engine

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Deploying a Helm chart on Linode Kubernetes Engine with Pulumi is a way to automate the setup of applications on your Kubernetes cluster. Pulumi allows you to define your infrastructure as code using familiar programming languages. In this case, we'll use TypeScript.

First, let's understand the core components of what we'll be creating:

- **Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE)**: This is Linode's managed Kubernetes service which allows you to run and manage containerized applications.

- **Helm Chart**: Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, which helps you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes applications. Charts are Helm packages that contain at least two things: A description of the package (`Chart.yaml`) and one or more templates to create Kubernetes resources.

- **RetroArch Web Helm Chart**: This chart will be used to deploy RetroArch Web, a popular open-source software for emulating retro games, to the Kubernetes cluster.

In this walkthrough, you'll see how to create a Linode Kubernetes Engine cluster and then deploy the RetroArch Web Helm chart to it. Before you begin, ensure you have the Pulumi CLI installed and your Linode API token is set up.

Now, let's write the TypeScript program:

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

// Create a Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) cluster.
const cluster = new linode.LkeCluster("my-cluster", {
    region: "us-central",
    k8sVersion: "1.20",
    labels: { "purpose": "retroarch-web-deployment" },
    tags: ["pulumi-demo"],
    nodePools: {
        "pool1": {
            count: 3,
            type: "g6-standard-1",
        },
    },
});

// Export the kubeconfig so that we can use it with the Kubernetes provider.
export const kubeconfig = cluster.kubeconfig;

// Set up Kubernetes provider to use the kubeconfig from the Linode cluster.
const k8sProvider = new k8s.Provider("k8sProvider", {
    kubeconfig: cluster.kubeconfig,
});

// Create a Helm Release to deploy RetroArch Web.
const retroArchWebRelease = new k8s.helm.v3.Release("retroarch-web-release", {
    chart: "retroarch-web",
    repositoryOpts: {
        repo: "http://charts.mycompany.com/", // Replace with the actual Helm repository URL.
    },
    // You can specify the version of chart here if necessary using `version` property.
    values: {
        // Here you can specify the values needed to configure your RetroArch Web deployment.
        // For a default installation, you can leave this object empty or provide customizations as per your requirements.
        service: {
            type: "LoadBalancer",
        },
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// Output the status of the Helm release.
export const retroArchWebReleaseStatus = retroArchWebRelease.status;
```

### Explanation:

- **Linode LKE Cluster**: We create a new LKE cluster using the `linode.LkeCluster` class. We specify the region, Kubernetes version, labels, and node pool configuration. The node pool defines the number of nodes and the type of nodes that make up our Kubernetes cluster.

- **Kubeconfig**: We export the kubeconfig of the newly created cluster. This contains the configuration needed to communicate with your Kubernetes cluster.

- **Kubernetes Provider**: The `k8s.Provider` class allows us to interact with our Kubernetes cluster using Pulumi's Kubernetes provider. We pass the kubeconfig we exported from our LKE cluster to this provider.

- **Helm Release**: We deploy the RetroArch Web application by creating a Helm release with `k8s.helm.v3.Release`. We specify the name of the Helm chart (`retroarch-web`) and the repository where the chart is located. In the `values` object, you can specify the configuration options for RetroArch Web. The service type `LoadBalancer` is specified to expose the RetroArch Web service externally. Note that you should replace `http://charts.mycompany.com/` with the actual repository URL where the `retroarch-web` chart is hosted.

- **Exports**: We export the release status, which can be used to check if the deployment was successful, and the kubeconfig, which you could use with `kubectl` or other Kubernetes tools to interact with your cluster.

After writing the code, you would typically run `pulumi up` in your command line to deploy the resources defined in the code. And that's it! You've defined the creation of a Linode Kubernetes cluster and the deployment of the RetroArch Web Helm chart as code using Pulumi.