Documentation

Kubeapps Kubeops Developer Guide

The kubeops component is a micro-service that creates an API endpoint for accessing the Helm API and Kubernetes resources.

Prerequisites

Download the Kubeapps source code

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/kubeapps $KUBEAPPS_DIR

The kubeops sources are located under cmd/kubeops/ and use packages from the pkg directory.

Install Kubeapps in your cluster

Kubeapps is a Kubernetes-native application. To develop and test Kubeapps components we need a Kubernetes cluster with Kubeapps already installed. Follow the Kubeapps installation guide to install Kubeapps in your cluster.

Building the kubeops binary

cd $KUBEAPPS_DIR/cmd/kubeops
go build

This builds the kubeops binary in the working directory.

Running in development

If you are using Minikube it is important to start the cluster enabling RBAC (on by default in Minikube 0.26+) in order to check the authorization features:

minikube start
eval $(minikube docker-env)

Note: By default, Kubeapps will try to fetch the latest version of the image so in order to make this workflow work in Minikube you will need to update the imagePullPolicy first:

kubectl patch deployment kubeapps-internal-kubeops -n kubeapps --type=json -p='[{"op": "replace", "path": "/spec/template/spec/containers/0/imagePullPolicy", "value": "IfNotPresent"}]'

The easiest way to create the kubeops image is to run the Makefile task to do so:

Since Kubeops depends on certain information only available within the cluster, a deployment with Telepresence becomes much more difficult to set up.

IMAGE_TAG=dev make kubeapps/kubeops

This will generate an image kubeapps/kubeops:dev that you can use in the current deployment:

If you are using Kind, remember to manually add the image to your cluster; otherwhise, your k8s cluster will not be able to pull the image. To do so, run: kind load docker-image kubeapps/kubeops:dev

kubectl set image -n kubeapps deployment kubeapps-internal-kubeops kubeops=kubeapps/kubeops:dev

For further redeploys you can change the version to deploy a different tag or rebuild the same image and restart the pod running:

kubectl delete pod -n kubeapps -l app=kubeapps-internal-kubeops

Note: If you are using a cloud provider to develop the service you will need to retag the image and push it to a public registry.

Running tests

You can run the kubeops tests along with the tests of all the projects:

make test

Getting started

Discover how to deploy Kubeapps in your cluster, add some package repositories and start managing your applications!