helmspray

README

Helm Spray

What is Helm Spray?

This is a Helm plugin to install or upgrade sub-charts one by one from an umbrella chart.

It works like helm upgrade --install, except that it upgrades or installs each sub-charts according to a weight (>=0) set on each sub-chart. All sub-charts of weight 0 are processed first, then sub-charts of weight 1, etc. Chart weight shall be specified using the <chart name>.weight value.

Each sub-chart is deployed under a specific Release named <chart name or alias>, enabling a later individual upgrade targeting this sub-chart only. All global or individual upgrade should still be done on the umbrella chart.

Continuous Integration & Delivery

Helm Spray is building and delivering under Travis.

Usage

  $ helm spray [flags] CHART

Helm Spray shall always be called on the umbrella chart, whatever it is for upgrading the full set of charts, or for upgrading individual sub-charts (using the --target option). For a proper usage of helm spray, the umbrella chart shall have a requirement.yaml file listing all the sub-charts to be deployed (under the dependencies element). Sub-charts may have an alias element and the condition element shall be set to the value <chart name or alias>.enabled. Here is an example of requirement.yaml file for an umbrella chart having three sub-charts, one of them having an alias:

dependencies:
- name: micro-service-1
  version: ~1.2
  repository: http://chart-museum/charts
  condition: micro-service-1.enabled
- name: micro-service-2
  version: ~2.3
  repository: http://chart-museum/charts
  condition: micro-service-2.enabled
- name: micro-service-3
  alias: ms3
  version: ~1.1
  repository: http://chart-museum/charts
  condition: ms3.enabled

A "values" file shall also be set with the weight ito be applied to each individual sub-chart. This weight shall be set in the <chart name or alias>.weight element. A good practice is that thei weigths are statically set in the default values.yaml file of the umbrella chart (and not in a yaml file provided using the -f option), as sub-chart's weight is not likely to change over time. As an example corresponding to the above requirement.yaml file, the values.yaml file of the umbrella chart might be:

micro-service-1:
  weight: 0

micro-service-2:
  weight: 1

ms3:
  weight: 2

Several sub-charts may have the same weight, meaning that they will be upgraded together. Upgrade of sub-charts of weight n+1 will only be triggered when upgrade of sub-charts of weight n is completed.

Helm Spray creates one helm Release per sub-chart. Releases are individually upgraded when running the helm spray process, in particular when using the --target option. The name and version of the umbrella chart is set as the Chart name for all the Revisions.

NAME            REVISION        UPDATED                         STATUS          CHART           APP VERSION     NAMESPACE
micro-service-1 12              Wed Jan 30 17:19:15 2019        DEPLOYED        solution-0.1    0.1             default
micro-service-2 21              Wed Jan 30 17:18:55 2019        DEPLOYED        solution-0.1    0.1             default
ms3             7               Wed Jan 30 17:18:45 2019        DEPLOYED        solution-0.1    0.1             default

Note: if an alias is set for a sub-chart, then this is this alias that should be used with the --target optioni, not the sub-chart name.

Flags:

      --debug              enable verbose output
      --dry-run            simulate a spray
      --force              force resource update through delete/recreate if needed
  -h, --help               help for helm
  -n, --namespace string   namespace to spray the chart into. (default "default")
      --reset-values       when upgrading, reset the values to the ones built into the chart
      --reuse-values       when upgrading, reuse the last release's values and merge in any overrides from the command line via --set and -f. If '--reset-values' is specified, this is ignored.
      --set string         set values on the command line (can specify multiple or separate values with commas: key1=val1,key2=val2)
  -t, --target strings     specify the subchart to target (can specify multiple). If --target is not specified, all subcharts are targeted
  -f, --values strings     specify values in a YAML file or a URL (can specify multiple)
      --version string     specify the exact chart version to install. If this is not specified, the latest version is installed

Install

  $ helm plugin install https://github.com/gemalto/helm-spray

The above will fetch the latest binary release of helm spray and install it.

Developer (From Source) Install

If you would like to handle the build yourself, instead of fetching a binary, this is how recommend doing it.

First, set up your environment:

• You need to have Go installed. Make sure to set $GOPATH
• If you don't have Glide installed, this will install it into $GOPATH/bin for you.

Clone this repo into your $GOPATH. You can use go get -d github.com/gemalto/helm-spray for that.

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/gemalto/helm-spray
$ make bootstrap build
$ SKIP_BIN_INSTALL=1 helm plugin install $GOPATH/src/github.com/gemalto/helm-spray

That last command will skip fetching the binary install and use the one you built.

Documentation

Overview

(c) Copyright 2018, Gemalto. All rights reserved. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.