Step 4: Deploying Kubeapps on a VMware Tanzu™ Community Edition cluster ¶

Once your TCE cluster is up and running and you have a valid configuration values file, you can proceed to deploy Kubeapps.

One of the key features of Tanzu is its use of Carvel. Carvel is a project that provides a set of reliable, single-purpose, composable tools that aid in your application building, configuration, and deployment to Kubernetes. In this tutorial, you will use the Carvel packaging format to install Kubeapps.

1. Check that Kubeapps is an available package in the cluster with:

   tanzu package available list kubeapps.community.tanzu.vmware.com
   

   In case you could not get Kubeapps showing up in the list of available packages, add it manually to the catalog by running (please change package version accordingly ):

   kubectl apply \
      -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware-tanzu/package-for-kubeapps/main/metadata.yaml \
      -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware-tanzu/package-for-kubeapps/main/8.1.7/package.yaml
   

2. Install Kubeapps with the configuration values file created in the previous step of the tutorial

   tanzu package install kubeapps --create-namespace -n kubeapps \
      --package-name kubeapps.community.tanzu.vmware.com \
      --version 8.1.7 \
      --values-file your-values-file.yaml
   

3. Check that Kubeapps has been successfully reconciled by running

   tanzu package installed list -n kubeapps
   

   And output should look like this:

   NAME      PACKAGE-NAME                         PACKAGE-VERSION  STATUS
   kubeapps  kubeapps.community.tanzu.vmware.com  8.1.7            Reconcile succeeded
   

   If Kubeapps could not be reconciled, you can get more information by running:

   tanzu package installed get kubeapps -n kubeapps
   

4. Optionally you can check with Kapp (part of Carvel tools) which resources have been created when deploying Kubeapps:

   kapp inspect -a kubeapps-ctrl -n kubeapps
   

5. At this point, Kubeapps should be deployed and running in the TCE cluster.

   If you chose a LoadBalancer to access Kubeapps: wait for your cluster to assign a LoadBalancer IP or Hostname to the kubeapps Service and access it on that address:

   kubectl get service kubeapps --namespace kubeapps --watch
   

   If you chose an Ingress to access Kubeapps: open a browser and navigate to the FQDN defined for Kubeapps, for example https://tce-cluster.foo.com .

   When using OIDC, you will need to configure your OAuth2 client to admit the LoadBalancer IP/Host or the Ingress FQDN as authorized origins and redirects. Please add the suffix /oauth2/callback to the redirect URLs in your OIDC provider setup.

Continue the tutorial by managing applications with Kubeapps .