Deploy the whitelister helm chart on Rancher

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

To deploy the "whitelister" Helm chart on a Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster using Pulumi, we'll break down the process into several steps:

Set up the Rancher Kubernetes cluster: For this example, we'll assume you already have access to a Rancher-managed cluster where you have permissions to deploy resources.
Set up the Helm Release: We need to configure Pulumi to deploy Helm charts. This includes setting up the provider configurations to interact with both Rancher and the Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher.
Deploy the whitelister Helm chart: At this stage, we'll define the necessary configurations for the "whitelister" Helm chart and deploy it to the Kubernetes cluster.

For the purpose of this demonstration, I'm going to use the rancher2 Pulumi provider, which allows us to interact with a Rancher server. The Helm chart will be deployed using the standard Kubernetes provider, which relies on the kubeconfig file obtained from Rancher to access the Kubernetes API.

Below is a Pulumi program written in TypeScript that illustrates how this deployment can be achieved. This example assumes you have Pulumi and the necessary cloud CLI tools installed locally and that you're authenticated with the Rancher server. We will not cover these aspects here due to complexity, but Pulumi's documentation provides guides on getting started.

First, you'll need to install the @pulumi/rancher2 package, the Kubernetes package @pulumi/kubernetes, and any other dependencies by running npm install.

npm install @pulumi/rancher2 @pulumi/kubernetes

Now, let's go through the Pulumi TypeScript program.

import * as pulumi from '@pulumi/pulumi';
import * as k8s from '@pulumi/kubernetes';
import * as rancher2 from '@pulumi/rancher2';

// This example assumes you have already created a cluster in Rancher and it's accessible via the clusterId
const clusterId = '<your-rancher-cluster-id>';

// Fetch the kubeconfig file from Rancher for the Kubernetes cluster
const kubeconfig = pulumi.output(rancher2.getKubeConfig({ clusterId: clusterId }, { async: true }))
    .apply(config => config.config);

// Instantiate the Kubernetes provider using the kubeconfig we obtained from Rancher
const k8sProvider = new k8s.Provider('k8s-provider', {
    kubeconfig: kubeconfig,
});

// Deploy the 'whitelister' Helm chart using the Kubernetes provider
const whitelisterChart = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart('whitelister', {
    chart: 'whitelister',
    // Here you might need to specify the repository where your whitelister chart is located
    // e.g., `repo: 'http://your-chart-repo/'`
    // If the whitelister chart requires any specific values, provide them in the `values` property
    values: {
        // Configuration values for the 'whitelister' chart go here
        // e.g., `replicaCount`: 1
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// Export a detail that might be useful, such as the Kubernetes API server URL
export const kubeApiServerUrl = pulumi.output(kubeconfig).apply(config => {
    const kubeConfig = JSON.parse(config);
    if (kubeConfig.clusters && kubeConfig.clusters.length > 0) {
        return kubeConfig.clusters[0].cluster.server;
    }
    return "Kubeconfig has no clusters";
});

This completes the deployment of the whitelister Helm chart on your Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster. Here's what the key parts of the code do:

We retrieve the Kubernetes cluster configuration from Rancher using rancher2.getKubeConfig, which provides us with the kubeconfig needed to connect to the Kubernetes cluster.
We then create a new Kubernetes provider instance configured with the kubeconfig. This allows Pulumi to interact with the Kubernetes cluster to manage resources.
With the Kubernetes provider in place, we then use k8s.helm.v3.Chart to install the whitelister Helm chart. In the values object, you would typically put the configuration specific to your deployment.
Lastly, we export the URL of the Kubernetes API server for your own reference. This can be useful if you need to interact with the cluster directly using kubectl or another Kubernetes tool.

You'll need to replace '<your-rancher-cluster-id>' with the actual cluster ID of your Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster.

To run this Pulumi program, save the code in a file called index.ts, and then execute it using Pulumi CLI commands, starting with pulumi up which will provision the resources as per the code.