Pulumi Workshop: Foundations to Advanced

Chapter 4 - Enter the World of GitOps!

Overview

In this chapter, we’ll pave the way for Argo CD, enabling it to deploy a straightforward application to our Kubernetes cluster. This application comes equipped with a Helm chart. We’ll once again employ StackReference to fetch outputs from our infrastructure stack and programmatically establish a Kubernetes provider.

New Concepts Introduced:

Release Resource: This will be used to deploy a Helm chart.
CustomResource Definition: This will be pivotal in defining an Argo CD Application.

For this chapter, I’ll be continuing with Go as my programming language of choice. However, always opt for the language that resonates best with your comfort and proficiency levels.

Prerequisites

The Kubernetes cluster from the previous chapter
Pulumi CLI installed
Go
Fork the https://github.com/dirien/helloserver repository, if you want to change the application
Optional: Install the Argo CD CLI

Instructions

Step 1 - Configure the Pulumi CLI with a new template!

If you run Pulumi for the first time, you will be asked to log in. Follow the instructions on the screen to login. You may need to create an account first, don’t worry it is free.

To initialize a new Pulumi project, run pulumi new. But this time we’re going to use a different template. As I am going to use Go and do some Kubernetes deployments, I am going to use the kubernetes-go template.

There are more pre-defined templates from Pulumi available, check out the Pulumi Templates for more information. You can of course also create your own templates and share them with your team or organization.

pulumi new kubernetes-go

You will be guided through a wizard to create a new Pulumi project. You can use the following values:

project name (04-argocd-setup):
project description (A minimal Go Pulumi program):  
Created project '04-argocd-setup'

Please enter your desired stack name.
To create a stack in an organization, use the format <org-name>/<stack-name> (e.g. `acmecorp/dev`).
stack name (dev): dev 
...

Please delete the existing Deployment resource. We will fill this later with the Argo CD deployment.

As we’re going to use the StackReference again, we need to set the infraStackRef and retrieve our kubeconfig. Same as in the previous chapter.

Check the docs for the Kubernetes provider for details about the Release and CustomResource resources.

These are the values to fill out for the Release resource:

Chart: oci://ghcr.io/argoproj/argo-helm/argo-cd
Version: 5.49.0
Namespace: argocd
Values Override: {"server.service.type":"LoadBalancer"}

And these are the values for the CustomResource:

ApiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
Kind: Application
Name: hello-server-argocd-app
Namespace: argocd same as the Release resource, use the reference to the Namespace property from the Release resource.
OtherFields:

spec:
  project: default
  source:
    repoURL: 'https://github.com/dirien/helloserver'
    path: ./delivery/charts/hello-server
    targetRevision: HEAD
    helm:
      valuesObject:
        service:
          type: LoadBalancer
  destination:
    server: 'https://kubernetes.default.svc'
    namespace: hello-server
  syncPolicy:
    automated:
      prune: true
      selfHeal: true
    syncOptions:
    - CreateNamespace=true

Now we can deploy the stack. Run pulumi up to deploy the stack.

To see if everything is deployed correctly, you can check the Argo CD UI. To access the UI, you need to port-forward the service.

kubectl -n argocd get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d
kubectl get svc -n argocd
kubectl port-forward service/argocd-<hash>-server -n argocd 8080:443`

Open the browser and navigate to https://localhost:8080. Use the username admin and the password you retrieved with the kubectl command.

You should see a tile with the name hello-server-argocd-app and the status Healthy.

Step 2 - Change the default value of the Helm chart

If you forked the https://github.com/dirien/helloserver, you can change the default tag value in ` /helloserver/delivery/charts/hello-server/values.yaml to v0.1.1` and commit the change.

Now the GitOps pipeline should deploy the new version of the application, you can either wait for the next sync or use the Argo CD UI to trigger a sync.

Stretch Goals

Can you deploy a second helm chart to the cluster?
What happens if you delete a Kubernetes resource from the UI in the hello-server namespace?

Learn More

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