Helm Deployment

This tutorial will show you how to:

• Prepare a Helm chart.
• Deploy your Vehicle App to a local K3D cluster.

Prerequisites

• Devcontainer is up and running.
• Complete the tutorial How to create a Vehicle App .

Use the sample Helm chart

If the Vehicle App has been created from one of our template repositories, a sample Helm chart is already available inside our maintained runtime-k3d of the devenv-runtimes package at ./runtime-k3d/src/app_deployment/config/helm/ and can be used as it is without any modification. This sample chart is using the values from ./runtime-k3d/src/app_deployment/config/helm/values.yaml file.

Prepare a new Helm chart

If you would like to write a new helm chart, this section will guide you to adapt and deploy a new Vehicle App, which is called my_vehicle_app for this walkthrough.

1. Start Visual Studio Code and open the previously created Vehicle App repository.

2. Create a new folder my_vehicle_app under deploy

3. Copy all files from the devenv-runtimes/runtime-k3d/src/app_deployment/config/helm folder to the new folder deploy/my_vehicle_app.

4. Rename the file deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/templates/vehicleapp.yaml to deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/templates/my_vehicle_app.yaml

5. Open deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/Chart.yaml and change the name of the chart to my_vehicle_app and provide a meaningful description.

   apiVersion: v2
   name: my-vehicle-app
   description: Short description for my-vehicle-app
   
   # A chart can be either an 'application' or a 'library' chart.
   #
   # Application charts are a collection of templates that can be packaged into versioned archives
   # to be deployed.
   #
   # Library charts provide useful utilities or functions for the chart developer. They're included as
   # a dependency of application charts to inject those utilities and functions into the rendering
   # pipeline. Library charts do not define any templates and cannot be deployed as a result.
   type: application
   
   # This is the chart version. This version number should be incremented each time you make changes
   # to the chart and its templates, including the app version.
   # Versions are expected to follow Semantic Versioning (https://semver.org/)
   version: 0.1.0
   
   # This is the version number of the application being deployed. This version number should be
   # incremented each time you make changes to the application. Versions are not expected to
   # follow Semantic Versioning. They should reflect the version the application is using.
   appVersion: 1.16.0
   

6. Open deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/values.yaml and change name, repository and daprAppid to my-vehicle-app. Rename the root node from imageVehicleApp to imageMyVehicleApp.

   imageMyVehicleApp:
     name: my-vehicle-app
     repository: k3d-registry.localhost:12345/my-vehicle-app
     pullPolicy: Always
     # Overrides the image tag whose default is the chart appVersion.
     tag: "#SuccessfulExecutionOfReleaseWorkflowUpdatesThisValueToReleaseVersionWithoutV#"
     daprAppid: my-vehicle-app
     daprPort: 50008
   
     nameOverride: ""
     fullnameOverride: ""
   

7. Open deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/templates/my_vehicle_app.yaml and replace imageVehicleApp with imageMyVehicleApp:

   apiVersion: apps/v1
   kind: Deployment
   metadata:
   name: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
   labels:
       app: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
   spec:
   selector:
       matchLabels:
       app: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
   template:
       metadata:
       annotations:
           dapr.io/enabled: "true"
           dapr.io/app-id: "{{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.daprAppid}}"
           dapr.io/app-port: "{{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.daprPort}}"
           dapr.io/log-level: "debug"
           dapr.io/config: "config"
           dapr.io/app-protocol: "grpc"
       labels:
           app: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
           {{- include "helm.selectorLabels" . | nindent 8 }}
       spec:
       containers:
           - name: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
           image: "{{ .Values.imageMyVehicleApp.repository }}:{{ .Values.imageMyVehicleApp.tag | default .Chart.AppVersion }}"
           imagePullPolicy: {{ .Values.imageMyVehicleApp.pullPolicy }}
   

At this point, the Helm chart is prepared for the next step and the folder structure under deploy/my_vehicle_app should look like this:

deploy
├── my_vehicle_app
│   └── helm
│       └── templates
│           └── _helpers.tpl
│           └── my_vehicle_app.yaml
│────────── .helmignore
│────────── Chart.yaml
└────────── values.yaml

Deploy your Vehicle App to the local K3D cluster

Prerequisites

• A local K3D installation must be available. For how to setup K3D, check out this tutorial .

After the Helm chart has been prepared, you can deploy it to the local K3D cluster by following the steps:

1. Building and pushing the Docker image for your Vehicle App

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build -f ./app/Dockerfile --progress=plain -t localhost:12345/my-vehicle-app:local . --no-cache

docker push localhost:12345/my-vehicle-app:local

2. Installing the Helm Chart

helm install my-vapp-chart ./deploy/my_vehicle_app --values ./deploy/my_vehicle_app/values.yaml --wait --timeout 60s

These steps are building the local source code of the application into a container, pushing it to the local cluster registry and deploying the app via a helm chart to the K3D cluster. Rerun the steps after you have changed the source code of your application to re-deploy with the latest changes.

If you have issues installing the helm chart again try uninstalling the chart upfront:

helm uninstall my-vapp-chart

Next steps

• Tutorial: Start runtime services in Kubernetes
• Concept: Build and release process