Flux-Helm GitOps Lab

This is a local harness for validating the delivery of Flux resources without the need to operate/manage the resources through a Git repository. It was inspired by Flux/Cues and tries to enhance that experience by wrapping the deployment process in tilt and devcontainers so that it can be portable and reproducible. The idea is that it is easier to get to grips with the different flux resources and GitOps model without needing to do more than make changes to a local file structure.

How it works

The included Devcontainer has all the necessary tools to start working locally, including Flux. You only need to bring Docker/Docker-Compose and VSCode to get started.

The tilt file deploys Flux by via a flux install .... additional manifests located in ./dev/ are used to configure the bucket/secret for source controller to referernce to sunc withthe local directory.

In addition to this Minio is deployed and configured as a local bucket source in cluster. Once the cluster is built there is an adjacent minio-client preconfigured to watch the [resources] folder in the repo which contains the popular 'podinfo' microservice as an example. you can remove this and place what ever flux resources you wish here.

Once the minio-client is up, it will automatically sync the minio bucket contents to this folder and source-controller will retrieve the contents of preconfigured bucket source (its on a low 10s interval but you may need to be patient).

devcontainer local setup

If you are developing on VSCode the accompanying devcontainer containers all the necessary CLI's/packages to build ansible-operators and run a local development setup.

To build the local cluster you can use ctlptl to spin up a kind cluster:

ctlptl apply -f kind.yaml

to install the dependencies you can use the tiltfile with tilt:

tilt up

Once in play you should be able to navigate to the VSCode tab and use the 'Sources' and 'Workloads' tabs to identify that pod-info has been deployed per the resources included under the resources folder.

manual checks

you can use the following commands to verify the folder is syncing the bucket and source-controller is reconciling the contents:

flux get sources bucket -n flux-system
flux get sources chart -n flux-system
flux get sources helm -n flux-system

you should see the outputted respective artifacts at each stage of the process.

shutdown:

tilt down
ctlptl delete -f kind.yaml