Deploy the controller helm chart on Rancher

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Certainly! To deploy a Helm chart on Rancher using Pulumi, you would typically use the Pulumi Rancher2 provider which allows defining a variety of Rancher resources. One of the resources provided by the Rancher2 provider is `rancher2.CatalogV2`, which allows managing Helm chart repositories in Rancher.

With Helm charts, you can manage Kubernetes applications. Rancher helps manage Kubernetes clusters across different infrastructures and `rancher2.CatalogV2` is used to add the Helm chart repository so you can install charts from it to your Rancher-managed cluster.

The following TypeScript program demonstrates how you would deploy a Helm chart on Rancher using Pulumi. It includes comments to explain what each part of the code does:

1. First, we will prepare our project with the necessary dependencies. You need to have Pulumi CLI installed and be authenticated to your Pulumi account.
2. Then, install the Rancher2 provider for Pulumi via NPM:
   ```bash
   npm install @pulumi/rancher2
   ```
3. Use the following Pulumi code to deploy the controller Helm chart on a Rancher cluster:

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

// Configure your Rancher endpoint and access token
const rancherEndpoint = 'https://your-rancher-endpoint';
const accessToken = 'your-rancher-access-token';
const clusterId = 'your-cluster-id';

// Set up the Provider configuration for Rancher
const rancherProvider = new rancher2.Provider('rancher-provider', {
    apiEndpoint: rancherEndpoint,
    accessToken: accessToken,
    noVerifySsl: true, // Set this depending on your SSL setup
});

// Add a Helm chart repository as a Catalog in Rancher
const catalog = new rancher2.CatalogV2('custom-catalog', {
    clusterId: clusterId,
    url: 'https://helm-repo-url/', // Replace with your Helm repo URL
    name: 'custom-catalog-name', // Replace with your preferred catalog name
}, { provider: rancherProvider });

// Deploy a Helm chart from the repository you just added to Rancher
const helmChart = new rancher2.AppV2('controller', {
    clusterId: clusterId,
    chartName: 'controller-chart-name', // Replace with the name of your Helm chart
    releaseName: 'controller-release', // Replace with the name you want for the Helm release
    repoName: catalog.name, // This links to the Catalog V2 we just created
    namespace: 'default', // Set the namespace in which to install the chart
    values: {}, // Here you can specify the values to configure the Helm chart
    version: '1.0.0', // Specify the version of the chart you want to deploy
}, { provider: rancherProvider });

// To retrieve the URL of the deployed controller application, 
// you might use a stack output, depending on the service type of your application
export const applicationUrl = pulumi.interpolate`http://your-cluster-url/service/${helmChart.releaseName}`;
```

### What is happening here?

- We import the modules we need from `pulumi` and `@pulumi/rancher2`.
- Set up our Rancher provider with the required access information (endpoint, access token).
- Add a new `CatalogV2` resource representing a Helm chart repository within Rancher.
- Deploy an application with `AppV2`, which represents a Helm release in Rancher, using the catalog we created.
- We export an interpolated string as `applicationUrl` that might represent how we expect to access the deployed application.

Please note that this is a general example, and for it to work for your case, you'll need to adjust values like the Rancher endpoint, access token, cluster ID, Helm repo URL, chart name, release name, chart version, and any specific values you need to pass to the Helm chart.

Remember, the actual URL (`applicationUrl`) and method to access the deployed application would depend on details of how services are exposed in your Rancher environment and the Kubernetes cluster.