FluxCD Tutorial

Kubernetic now supports managing FluxCD resources. In this tutorial we'll show how to get started with FluxCD to do Continuous Delivery of your workflow and apply GitOps practices.

Getting Started

We'll be following alongside the Getting Started from FluxCD website, you're invited to first do the FluxCD tutorial, but it is not required to be able to follow along here.

Before you begin

To follow the guide, you need the following:

• A Kubernetes cluster. We recommend Kubernetes kind for trying Flux out in a local development environment.
• A GitHub personal access token with repo permissions. See the GitHub documentation on creating a personal access token.
• FluxCD installed on your cluster: See FluxCD guide up to Install Flux onto your cluster step.

Objectives

• Deploy a sample application using Flux Kustomization.
• Deploy a sample application using Flux HelmRelease.
• Perform GitOps using Flux.

Prepare

All FluxCD resources should be created under the fluxcd-system namespace so that FluxCD can read them.

Make sure you selected the proper context (e.g. kind-kind), namespace and then go to the gitrepositories resource.

If you installed properly the FluxCD before you should see a flux-system gitrepository that points to your fleet-infra repository.

Deploy a sample application using Flux Kustomization

We'll be deploying an app from a public repository github.com/stefanprodan/podinfo, podinfo is a tiny web application made with Go.

First we need to define our git repository as the source of our deployment. On gitrepositories resources click Create button (or press C) and fill-in the following:

• Name: podinfo
• URL: https://github.com/stefanprodan/podinfo

By default the master branch will be monitored, but can be configured otherwise.

Once created it should be shown as Ready after a few seconds:

Now let's deploy the app. On kustomizations resources click Create button (or press C) and fill-in the following:

• Name: podinfo
• Source: Choose GitRepository/podinfo from dropdown
• Target namespace: Choose default from dropdown
• Path: ./kustomize
• Prune: true

Once created it should be shown as Ready after a few seconds:

Click on the newly created podinfo kustomization to see the resources that are created:

You can now click on each of the created resources to navigate there.

• Click on the podinfo Deployment to view the corresponding Pods.
• Press L to view the logs.
• Go to Ports tab and port-forward the http port (right click > Start Port Forward).
• Click on the Local Port to open on a browser.

Let's cleanup everything until now.

• Stop Port Forward.
• Go to kustomizations and delete podinfo. With prune enabled it will delete all generated resources.
• Go to gitrepositories and delete podinfo.

Deploy a sample application using Flux HelmRelease

We can also deploy the app using a Helm chart. The podinfo contains also a chart we can use.

First we need to define the source of the helm repository. On helmrepositories resources click Create button (or press C) and fill-in the following:

• Name: podinfo
• URL: https://stefanprodan.github.io/podinfo

Once created it should be shown as Ready after a few seconds:

Now let's deploy the app. On helmreleases resources click Create button (or press C) and fill-in the following:

• Name: podinfo
• Source: Choose HelmRepository/podinfo from dropdown
• Chart: podinfo
• Target namespace: Choose default from dropdown

Once created it should be shown as Ready after a few seconds:

You can now go to default namespace and view deployments.

• Click on the default-podinfo Deployment to view the corresponding Pods.
• Press L to view the logs.
• Go to Ports tab and port-forward http (right click > Start Port Forward)
• Click on the Local Port to open on a browser.

Let's cleanup everything again.

• Stop Port Forward.
• Go to helmreleases and delete podinfo (It will delete all generated resources).
• Go to helmrepositories and delete podinfo.

Perform GitOps using Flux

Until now we created manually the Flux resources directly to Kubernetes but we didn't engage with any GitOps practices. Now we'll perform the same process as before but the resources will be stored in a Git repository and FluxCD will pull the resources from there.

You should already have a fleet-infra repository on your GitHub, we'll add the resources there.

On gitrepositories resources click Create button (or press C), fill-in the following and click Preview:

• Name: podinfo
• URL: https://github.com/stefanprodan/podinfo

Click Copy to copy the YAML and store it inside fleet-infra repository under ./clusters/my-cluster/podinfo-source.yaml:

Commit and push the podinfo-source.yaml file:

git add -A && git commit -m "Add podinfo GitRepository"
git push

On kustomizations resources click Create button (or press C), fill-in the following and click Preview:

• Name: podinfo
• Source: Choose GitRepository/podinfo from dropdown
• Target namespace: Choose default from dropdown
• Path: ./kustomize
• Prune: true

Click Copy to copy the YAML and store it inside fleet-infra repository under ./clusters/my-cluster/podinfo-kustomization.yaml

Commit and push to the repository:

git add -A && git commit -m "Add podinfo Kustomization"
git push

Wait for reconciliation and once created it should be shown as Ready after a few seconds:

Click on the newly created podinfo kustomization to see the resources that are created:

You can now click on each of the created resources to navigate there.

• Click on the podinfo Deployment to view the corresponding Pods.
• Press L to view the logs.
• Go to Ports tab and port-forward the http port (right click > Start Port Forward).
• Click on the Local Port to open on a browser.

Summary

We created a GitRepository to connect to a public repository where a sample application is located and then deployed it using Kustomization to our cluster.

We also created a HelmRepository to connect to a Helm repository a public HTTP Server that houses an index.yaml of charts. We then created a HelmRelease to deploy the sample app using a Helm chart.

Lastly we commited all our configuration to a fleet-infra repository, so that Flux pulls the configuration from the repository and syncs the cluster applying GitOps practices.