Deploy the ingress-class helm chart on Rancher

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Deploying an ingress-class Helm chart on Rancher involves several steps:

1. **Setting up the Pulumi project:** You'll initialize a new Pulumi project using the desired language (TypeScript in this case) and install necessary dependencies including the `@pulumi/rancher2` package for interacting with Rancher via Pulumi.

2. **Configuring Rancher provider:** Configure the Pulumi project to use the Rancher 2 provider. This requires setting up Rancher access credentials and pointing Pulumi to the correct Rancher server.

3. **Creating a Rancher cluster:** If you don't already have a cluster set up, use Pulumi to provision a new cluster within Rancher. The cluster where your Helm chart will be deployed needs to have Kubernetes running and be properly managed by Rancher.

4. **Installing the helm chart:** Use Pulumi's Helm Release resource to deploy the ingress-class chart to the cluster. You'll need to specify the chart repository, name, version, and any values needed to configure the ingress controller.

Below is a Pulumi program written in TypeScript that demonstrates this process. This example assumes that you already have a Rancher server set up and have access to it. It also assumes you have a Kubernetes cluster registered with Rancher.

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

// Create a new Rancher2 provider instance that specifies the Rancher server's URL and access credentials.
const rancherProvider = new rancher2.Provider("rancherProvider", {
    apiURL: "https://your-rancher-server-url/v3",
    accessKey: "your-rancher-access-key",
    secretKey: "your-rancher-secret-key",
    // Specify any additional provider settings if necessary.
});

// Use an existing Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher.
// Replace 'clusterId' with the actual ID of the Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster.
const cluster = pulumi.output(rancher2.getCluster({
    name: "existing-cluster-id",
}, { provider: rancherProvider }));

// Create a new instance of the Kubernetes provider pointing to the cluster retrieved above.
const k8sProvider = new k8s.Provider("k8sProvider", {
    kubeconfig: cluster.kubeConfig,
});

// Deploy the ingress-class Helm chart to the specified cluster.
const ingressClassChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart("ingressClass", {
    chart: "ingress-class",
    version: "your-chart-version", // specify the chart version
    fetchOpts: {
        repo: "your-chart-repository", // specify the Helm chart repository URL
    },
    values: {
        // ... specify any values for configuring the chart ...
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// Export the ingress endpoint to access from outside the cluster.
export const ingressEndpoint = ingressClassChart.getResourceProperty("v1/Service", "ingress-class", "status");

```

Replace placeholder values like `https://your-rancher-server-url/v3`, `your-rancher-access-key`, `your-rancher-secret-key`, `existing-cluster-id`, `your-chart-version`, and `your-chart-repository` with actual values pertaining to your environment.

This code does the following:

- It creates a provider for the Rancher2 API, which allows you to interact with your Rancher server programmatically.
- It retrieves information about an existing Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher. To interact with it, we establish a Kubernetes provider using the kubeconfig from the retrieved cluster.
- It uses the Pulumi Kubernetes provider to deploy a Helm chart onto the Kubernetes cluster. A Helm chart is a package that contains all the necessary resource definitions to deploy an application or service in Kubernetes. The `ingress-class` here is an example; you'll need to provide the actual Helm chart you want to deploy.
- An export is then set up to output the ingress endpoint, which can then be used to access the deployed ingress outside the cluster.

To deploy this with Pulumi, save this code to a `.ts` file, and then run `pulumi up` in the command line from the directory containing the file. It will provision the resources as defined in the code if everything is set up correctly.

Remember to replace the placeholder values with the actual details from your setup and ensure that the rancher2 provider version (`@pulumi/rancher2`) and your Pulumi CLI are up-to-date.