Deploying Spinnaker on Minikube (Kubernetes) using Hal

 

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

To install Spinnaker locally follow the next steps. They will walk you through installing a local Kubernetes cluster (using Minikube) and deploying Spinnaker on it using Halyard.

If you plan to deploy Spinnaker on a remote Kubernetes cluster (AWS EKS, GKE / other), the steps are pretty similar.

Install Minikube

Minikube provides a way to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your laptop for users looking to try out Kubernetes or develop with it day-to-day.

To install Minikube, follow the steps here, depending on your platform: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-minikube/

Start Minikube. Take into consideration that Spinnaker is composed out of multiple microservices, so you’ll need quite some memory and cpu to run it locally.

minikube start --cpus 4 --memory 8192

Optional: Install Minio for S3 storage

Spinnaker needs a persistent storage, usually AWS S3. Instead of using an actual AWS S3 bucket, you can install a local server that mimics the AWS S3 API. This is where Minio comes into place.

To download Minio go here.
To start Minio locally:

export MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=minio
export MINIO_SECRET_KEY=miniostorage
minio server /tmp/minio_s3_data

Install Halyard

Halyard is a tool for configuring, installing, and updating Spinnaker.

For MacOS:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spinnaker/halyard/master/install/macos/InstallHalyard.sh
sudo bash InstallHalyard.sh

For other platforms go here.

Configure for Minikube (Kubernetes) deployment

At this point you should have the Minio server up and running alongside Minikube.
kubectl should also work

kubectl get nodes
NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
Minikube Ready  28d v1.10.3

Hal: Setup Spinnaker storage

hal config storage s3 edit --access-key-id minio --secret-access-key --region us-east-1 --endpoint http://127.0.0.1:9000

hal config storage edit --type s3

Hal: Configure Docker registry

At least a docker registry is required for the Spinnaker kubernetes setup. You can add the public docker registry:

hal config provider docker-registry account add dockerhub --address index.docker.io --repositories library/nginx

And you can even add your private Docker registries:

# hal config provider docker-registry account add docker-private-repo --address https://my-private-docker-repo.example.com --username myuser  --password

You then need to enable the docker-registry provider:

hal config provider docker-registry enable

Hal: Configure the Spinnaker Kubernetes provider

hal config provider kubernetes account add my-k8s-account --docker-registries dockerhub --context $(kubectl config current-context)

hal config provider kubernetes enable

hal config deploy edit --type=distributed --account-name my-k8s-account

Hal: Configure Spinnaker version

To view the full version list:

hal version list

To setup the desired version:

hal config version edit --version 1.8.0

Hal: Deploy spinnaker to Minikube (Kubernetes)

hal deploy apply

This will take a while. Hal will try to spin up all the required Spinnaker pods in the Kubernetes cluster.
You can see them in action by running

kubectl get pods --namespace spinnaker
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
spin-clouddriver-bootstrap-v000-fjhqs 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-clouddriver-v000-sm728 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-deck-v000-zwf69 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-echo-v000-fwfm5 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-front50-v000-njdzn 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-gate-v000-4kn5z 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-igor-v000-msbj2 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-orca-bootstrap-v000-64cg8 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-orca-v000-9lgp4 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-redis-bootstrap-v000-xtldr 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-redis-v000-vffcd 1/1 Running 0 2h
spin-rosco-v000-jvhh4 1/1 Running 0 2h

Connect to Spinnaker

Once everything is done, it’s time to connect to the Spinnaker UI. You can run:

hal deploy connect

If you don’t wanna use hal to connect, you can do a port forwarding to the Spinnaker pods:

alias spin_gate='kubectl port-forward -n spinnaker $(kubectl get pods -n spinnaker -o=custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name | grep gate) 8084:8084'

alias spin_deck='kubectl port-forward -n spinnaker $(kubectl get pods -n spinnaker -o=custom-columns=NAME:.metadata.name | grep deck) 9001:9000'

alias spinnaker='spin_gate &; spin_deck &'

And then run:

❯ spinnaker
[1] 20836
[2] 20840

❯ Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:8084 -> 8084
Forwarding from [::1]:8084 -> 8084
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:9001 -> 9000
Forwarding from [::1]:9001 -> 9000

Open your browser and go to http://localhost:9001