Vehicle App Deployment with Helm

This tutorial will show you how to:

• Prepare a Helm chart
• Deploy your Vehicle App to local K3D

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio Code with the Python extension installed. For information on how to install extensions on Visual Studio Code, see VS Code Extension Marketplace.
• Completed the tutorial How to create a vehicle app

Use the sample Helm chart

If the Vehicle App has been created from one of our template repositories, a sample Helm chart is already available under deploy/VehicleApp/helm and can be used as it is without any modification. This sample chart is using the values from deploy/VehicleApp/helm/values.yaml file, during the deployment of the VehicleApp, the neccessary app attributes from the AppManifest.json (e.g. app name and app port) will overwite the default values from the sample helm chart via the .vscode/runtime/k3d/deploy_vehicleapp.sh script.

Prepare a new Helm chart

If you would like to write a new helm chart, this section will guide you to adapt and deploy a new vehicle app, which is called my_vehicle_app for this walkthrough.

1. Start Visual Studio Code and open the previously created Vehicle App repository.

2. Create a new folder my_vehicle_app under deploy

3. Copy all files from the deploy/VehicleApp folder to the new folder deploy/my_vehicle_app.

4. Rename the file deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/templates/vehicleapp.yaml to deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/templates/my_vehicle_app.yaml

5. Open deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/Chart.yaml and change the name of the chart to my_vehicle_app and provide a meaningful description.

   apiVersion: v2
   name: my_vehicle_app
   description: Short description for my_vehicle_app
   
   # A chart can be either an 'application' or a 'library' chart.
   #
   # Application charts are a collection of templates that can be packaged into versioned archives
   # to be deployed.
   #
   # Library charts provide useful utilities or functions for the chart developer. They're included as
   # a dependency of application charts to inject those utilities and functions into the rendering
   # pipeline. Library charts do not define any templates and cannot be deployed as a result.
   type: application
   
   # This is the chart version. This version number should be incremented each time you make changes
   # to the chart and its templates, including the app version.
   # Versions are expected to follow Semantic Versioning (https://semver.org/)
   version: 0.1.0
   
   # This is the version number of the application being deployed. This version number should be
   # incremented each time you make changes to the application. Versions are not expected to
   # follow Semantic Versioning. They should reflect the version the application is using.
   appVersion: 1.16.0
   

6. Open deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/values.yaml and change name, repository and daprAppid to my_vehicle_app. Rename the root node from imageVehicleApp to imageMyVehicleApp.

   imageMyVehicleApp:
     name: my_vehicle_app
     repository: local/my_vehicle_app
     pullPolicy: Always
     # Overrides the image tag whose default is the chart appVersion.
     tag: "#SuccessfulExecutionOfReleaseWorkflowUpdatesThisValueToReleaseVersionWithoutV#"
     daprAppid: my_vehicle_app
     daprPort: 50008
   
     nameOverride: ""
     fullnameOverride: ""
   

7. Open deploy/my_vehicle_app/helm/templates/my_vehicle_app.yaml and replace imageVehicleApp with imageMyVehicleApp:

   apiVersion: apps/v1
   kind: Deployment
   metadata:
   name: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
   labels:
       app: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
   spec:
   selector:
       matchLabels:
       app: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
   template:
       metadata:
       annotations:
           dapr.io/enabled: "true"
           dapr.io/app-id: "{{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.daprAppid}}"
           dapr.io/app-port: "{{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.daprPort}}"
           dapr.io/log-level: "debug"
           dapr.io/config: "config"
           dapr.io/app-protocol: "grpc"
       labels:
           app: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
           {{- include "helm.selectorLabels" . | nindent 8 }}
       spec:
       containers:
           - name: {{.Values.imageMyVehicleApp.name}}
           image: "{{ .Values.imageMyVehicleApp.repository }}:{{ .Values.imageMyVehicleApp.tag | default .Chart.AppVersion }}"
           imagePullPolicy: {{ .Values.imageMyVehicleApp.pullPolicy }}
   

8. update or copy the scripts build_vehicleapp.sh and deploy_vehicleapp.sh in path (.vscode/scripts/runtime/k3d/) for the local Kubernates deployment and adjust the values according to the values AppManifest.json:

   • APP_NAME
   • APP_PORT
   • DOCKERFILE_FILE

9. update the script .github/scripts/deploy_imagefromghcr.sh for the CI workflow with the correct values from the AppManifest.json as above.

At this point, the Helm chart and updated scripts are ready to use and folder structure under deploy/my_vehicle_app should look like this:

deploy
├── my_vehicle_app
│   └── helm
│       └── templates
│           └── _helpers.tpl
│           └── my_vehicle_app.yaml
│────────── .helmignore
│────────── Chart.yaml
└────────── values.yaml

Deploy your Vehicle App to local K3D

Prerequisites

• A local K3D installation must be available. For how to setup K3D, check out this tutorial.

After the Helm chart has been prepared, you can deploy it to local K3D. Execute the script:

deploy/my_vehicle_app/deploy-my-vehicle-app.sh

This script builds the local source code of the application into a container, pushes that container to the local cluster registry and deploys the app via a helm chart to the K3D cluster. Rerun this script after you have changed the source code of your application to re-deploy with the latest changes.

Next steps

• Tutorial: Start runtime services locally
• Concept: Build and release process