This is an example rok8s-scripts configuration that deploys a NodeJS application to production. It is built for CircleCI, but should help give a basic overview of the pieces of a rok8s-scripts deployment regardless of your CI platform.

The file ./deploy/production.config is the main entry point for rok8s-scripts. It tells rok8s-scripts how to build the image and what registry to push it to.

The file ./.circleci/config.yml is the main entry point for CircleCI. In it, we run some of the scripts provided by rok8s-scripts. In particular, we use:

• docker-pull to get the last image we pushed, which warms the local docker cache for faster builds
• docker-build to build the image for the current commit
• docker-push to push the image for the current commit to our image repository
• prepare-kubectl to configure the kubectl command to be able to deploy resources to our Kubernetes cluster
• k8s-deploy-and-verify to deploy our image to Kubernetes and make sure the deployment succeeded

We also use the rok8s-scripts CI image, quay.io/reactiveops/ci-images:v9.2-stretch, to ensure rok8s-scripts and its dependencies are available during the build and deploy jobs.

• Run the following to copy this directory to a new git repository:

git clone https://github.com/FairwindsOps/rok8s-scripts
cp -r rok8s-scripts/examples/minimal rok8s-scripts-test
cd rok8s-scripts-test
git init
git add .
git commit -m "testing rok8s scripts"

• Create a new repository on GitHub
• Follow the instructions on GitHub to push your code to your new repo
• Go to circleci.com/dashboard and add your repo as a new project
• Click "Start Building" to kick off your first build

You'll see CircleCI start two jobs - one to build the image, and one to deploy it to Kubernetes. The build job should succeed, but the deploy job will fail, because we haven't configured credentials for our image repository or Kubernetes cluster.

These instructions are for quay.io, and will have to be adapted if you're using another image registry like AWS ECR, GCP GCR, or DockerHub.

• Set up a new repo on quay.io
• Create a new robot account
• Click the settings icon next to the robot account, and click "View credentials"
• In your project settings on CircleCI, go to "Environment Variables"
• Add an environment variable named quay_robot, and paste the value from Quay
• Add an environment variable named quay_token, and paste the value from Quay

• Update the rok8s-scripts configuration and Kubernetes deployment with the image registry:
  • Edit ./deploy/production.config with your quay organization and repository name, by setting EXTERNAL_REGISTRY_BASE_DOMAIN and REPOSITORY_NAME
  • Edit ./deploy/minimal-production.deployment.yml with your quay organization and repository name, by setting image under spec -> template -> spec -> containers -> *
• IF you did not use quay.io as your image registry, edit the .circleci/config.yml file at the root of your repository, and remove the docker login ... line from the references -> build_image -> commands section.

Note: Using your personal kubeconfig is NOT recommended. It is much more secure to create a service account. See the docs on Kubernetes auth for more details In order to deploy to Kubernetes, you'll need to base64 encode a valid kubeconfig and set it as an environment variable in CircleCI. We strongly recommend creating and using a service account for this step, but for simplicity the example below uses the kubeconfig stored in your home directory.

• Run:

cat ~/.kube/config | base64 -w 0 > kube-config-encoded.txt

• Create a new environment variable in CircleCI called KUBECONFIG_DATA
• Paste the contents of kube-config-encoded.txt as the environment variable value

Commit and push your changes to the master branch to trigger another build. Everything should run successfully this time, and you should see your app running inside your Kubernetes cluster.

You can check your app by running

kubectl port-forward --namespace rok8s-example svc/rok8s-example 3000:80

and visiting localhost:3000 in your browser.

To remove this example from your Kubernetes cluster, delete the namespace where it was deployed. See the NAMESPACE line of your ./deploy/production.config file.

For example: kubectl delete namespace rok8s-example

You may also want to remove the Github repository you created.