Install process is terrible

[bhavenger]

Hi!
If you were hoping that the installation process will be simple with these scripts - you just did it wrong. Instead of having to install according to the instructions in the documentation (put this here, put that here), I have to read the bash script and ansible roles, forced his way to this knowledge. Please make a separate manual for installation without any automation?

[neelimamukiri]

Thanks for the feedback.
For k8s you can use kubectl apply -f <files in https://github.com/contiv/install/tree/master/install/k8s/k8s1.6> after manually configuring them.
Pre 1.6 versions of k8s need https://github.com/contiv/install/tree/master/install/k8s/k8s1.4.

Contiv on Docker currently has two mechanisms for installation - install as a systemd service and install as a docker container. We will move to a simpler container based install for docker in future releases, which will allow you to have a kubectl apply like mechanism.

[joshwget]

Definitely looking forward to a Kubernetes based installation that's simply kubectl apply -f .... Removing the dependency on Ansible and host requirements like Python would be great.

[neelimamukiri]

@joshwget, the Kubernetes based installation to use with kubectl apply is available at https://github.com/contiv/install/tree/master/install/k8s/k8s1.6 as mentioned above. Specifically, please see the contiv.yaml for reference.

[robotica72]

Im with the others on this one - we were going to look at Contiv for our PoC and to be honest, the install is such a mess, I'm not sure we can realistically look at using it....

[vallard]

@neelimamukiri while it's true there is a really great contiv.yaml file, the fact remains that in order to use this contiv.yaml file you have to have all the prereqs setup from the installation script, which makes it much more complicated. I agree with @bhavenger that it may be useful to have documentation as to what the script does so people can create their own automated tools. Otherwise it may be better off making it so the contiv.yaml doesn't require any preinstallation setup. I realize this isn't as easy as it sounds.

[seanhig]

Sadly, I have to concur with the sentiment of this issue. We are also doing a POC, and Contiv held a lot of promise in the documentation... until I went to install it. Is anyone even using this outside of Vagrant? Minimal documentation is good for products that just work. This does not appear to be one of those. I've had to resort to reverse engineering just to install, sort of a red flag.

A bit more emphasis on the system requirements would be helpful as well... Eg. how do we know this has been tested with Docker 17.09 running on CentOS 1708?

[vallard]

Can any of the developers comment on plans to fix this? Is there something we as the community can do to make this better? I can't see how there would be anything that is higher priority than this issue. It doesn't matter how many features you have, nobody is going to use it unless they can install it. I've automated the process of installing this in KUBAM (https://kubam.io) but it still isn't flawless. Would like to make it as easy as calico or flannel.