Deploying Human Connection with Helm is very straight forward. All you have to do is to change certain parameters, like domain names and API keys, then you just install our provided Helm chart to your cluster.

Configuration

You can customize the network with your configuration by changing the values.yaml, all variables will be available as environment variables in your deployed kubernetes pods.

Probably you want to change this environment variable to your actual domain:

# in folder /deployment/helm
CLIENT_URI: "https://develop.human-connection.org"

If you want to edit secrets, you have to base64 encode them. See kubernetes documentation. You can also use helm-secrets, but we have yet to test it.

# example how to base64 a string:
$ echo -n 'admin' | base64
YWRtaW4=

Those secrets get base64 decoded and are available as environment variables in your deployed kubernetes pods.

https

If you start with setting up the https, when you install the app, it will automatically take care of the certificates for you.

First check that you are using Helm v3, this is important since it removes the need for Tiller. See, FAQ

$ helm version
# output should look similar to this:
#version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.0.2", GitCommit:"19e47ee3283ae98139d98460de796c1be1e3975f", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.13.5"}

Apply cert-manager CRDs before installing (or it will fail)

$ kubectl apply --validate=false -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jetstack/cert-manager/release-0.13.0/deploy/manifests/00-crds.yaml

Next, create the cert-manager namespace

$ kubectl create namespace cert-manager

Add the jetstack repo and update

$ helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io
$ helm repo update

Install cert-manager

$ helm install cert-manager --namespace cert-manager --version v0.13.0 jetstack/cert-manager

Deploy

Once you are satisfied with the configuration, you can install the app.

# in folder /deployment/helm/human-connection
$ helm install develop ./ --namespace human-connection

Where develop is the release name, in this case develop for our develop server and human-connection is the namespace, again customize for your needs. The release name can be anything you want. Just keep in mind that it is used in the templates to prepend the CLIENT_URI and other places.

This will set up everything you need for the network, including deployments, and their pods, services, ingress, volumes(PersitentVolumes), PersistentVolumeClaims, and even ClusterIssuers for https certificates.