Getting Started with Weave GitOps

This hands-on guide will introduce you to the basics of the GitOps Dashboard web UI, to help you understand the state of your system, before deploying a new application to your cluster. It is adapted from this guide - Flux - Getting Started.

If you haven't already, be sure to check out our introduction to Weave GitOps.

Before you begin

We will provide a complete walk-through of getting Flux installed and Weave GitOps configured. However, if you have:

• an existing cluster bootstrapped Flux version >= 0.32.0 🎉
• followed our installation doc to configure access to the Weave GitOps dashboard then install Weave GitOps 👏

Then you can skip ahead to Part 1 🏃 but note ⚠️ you may need to alter commands where we are committing files to GitHub ⚠️.

To follow along, you will need the following:

• A Kubernetes cluster - such as Kind.
• A GitHub account and personal access token with repo permissions.
• kubectl.

Install Flux

1. Install the flux CLI

   brew install fluxcd/tap/flux

   For other installation methods, see the relevant Flux documentation.

2. Export your credentials

   export GITHUB_TOKEN=<your-token>
   export GITHUB_USER=<your-username>

3. Check your Kubernetes cluster

   flux check --pre

   The output is similar to:

   ► checking prerequisites
   ✔ kubernetes 1.22.2 >=1.20.6
   ✔ prerequisites checks passed

4. Install Flux onto your cluster with the flux bootstrap command

   flux bootstrap github \
     --owner=$GITHUB_USER \
     --repository=fleet-infra \
     --branch=main \
     --path=./clusters/my-cluster \
     --personal

Full installation documentation including how to work with other Git providers is available here.

The bootstrap command above does following:

• Creates a git repository fleet-infra on your GitHub account
• Adds Flux component manifests to the repository
• Deploys Flux Components to your Kubernetes Cluster
• Configures Flux components to track the path /clusters/my-cluster/ in the repository

Install Weave GitOps

For this guide we will use the cluster user, for complete documentation including how to configure an OIDC provider see the documentation here.

1. Install the Weave GitOps CLI

   brew install weaveworks/tap/gitops

   For other installation methods, see our installation doc.

2. Clone your git repository where Flux has been bootstrapped.

   git clone https://github.com/$GITHUB_USER/fleet-infra
   cd fleet-infra

3. Run the following command which will create a HelmRepository and HelmRelease to deploy Weave GitOps

   PASSWORD="<your password>"
   gitops create dashboard ww-gitops \
     --password=$PASSWORD \
     --export > ./clusters/my-cluster/weave-gitops-dashboard.yaml

danger

This command stores a hash of a password. While this is relatively safe for demo and testing purposes it is recommend that you look at more secure methods of storing secrets (such as Flux's SOPS integration) for production systems.

1. Commit and push the weave-gitops-dashboard.yaml to the fleet-infra repository

   git add -A && git commit -m "Add Weave GitOps Dashboard"
   git push

2. Validate that Weave GitOps and Flux are installed

   kubectl get pods -n flux-system

   You should see something similar to:

   NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   helm-controller-5bfd65cd5f-gj5sz           1/1     Running   0          10m
   kustomize-controller-6f44c8d499-s425n      1/1     Running   0          10m
   notification-controller-844df5f694-2pfcs   1/1     Running   0          10m
   source-controller-6b6c7bc4bb-ng96p         1/1     Running   0          10m
   ww-gitops-weave-gitops-86b645c9c6-k9ftg    1/1     Running   0          5m

info

There's many other things you can configure in the weave gitops helm chart. For a reference, see our value file reference.

Part 1 - Weave GitOps overview

Weave GitOps provides insights into your application deployments, and makes continuous delivery with GitOps easier to adopt and scale across your teams. We will now login to the dashboard web UI and start to explore the state of our GitOps deployments.

Login to the GitOps Dashboard

1. Expose the service running on the cluster

   kubectl port-forward svc/ww-gitops-weave-gitops -n flux-system 9001:9001

2. Open the dashboard and login using either the cluster user or OIDC based on your configuration. If you followed the example above, the username will be admin, and the password is the non-encrypted value you provided as $PASSWORD.

   

Applications view

When you login to the dashboard you are brought to the Applications view, which allows you to quickly understand the state of your deployments across a cluster at a glance. It shows summary information from kustomization and helmrelease objects.

In the above screenshot you can see:

• a Kustomization called flux-system, which was created when Flux was bootstrapped onto the Cluster, and is deploying the GitOps Toolkit controllers. It is also deploying further Flux objects defined in the same repo, so that Flux will deploy additional workloads which includes our Helm Chart for Weave GitOps.
• a HelmRelease called ww-gitops which deploys the aforementioned Helm Chart.

This table view shows the reported status so you can understand whether a reconciliation has been successful, and when they have last been updated. You can also see where the Flux objects are deployed and which Source object they are reconciling from; clicking the name of the Source it will take you to a detail view for the given source object. The view automatically updates every few seconds so you know the current state of your system.

You can search for and filter objects by Name by clicking the magnifying glass, or filter by Type by clicking the strawberry icon to its right.

Clicking the Name of an object will take you to a detailed view for the given Kustomization or HelmRelease. Which we will explore in a moment.

The Sources view

Clicking on Sources in the left hand menu will bring you to the Sources view. This view shows you where flux pulls its application definitions from, for example Git repositories, and the current state of that synchronization. This shows summary information from gitrepository, helmrepository, helmchart and bucket objects.

In the above screenshot you can see:

• a GitRepository called flux-system, which was created when Flux was bootstrapped onto the Cluster, and contains the manifests for the GitOps Toolkit and Weave GitOps and various Flux objects.
• a HelmChart called flux-system-ww-gitops, which is automatically created by Flux when you define a HelmRelease to deploy a Helm Chart from a given source.
• a HelmRepository called ww-gitops which pulls from the Helm Repository where the Weave GitOps Helm Chart is published.

The table view again shows summary status information so you can see whether Flux has been able to successfully pull from a given source and which specific commit was last detected. It shows key information like the Interval, namely how frequently Flux will check for updates in a given source location. You can apply filtering as per the Applications view, can click the URL to navigate to a given source i.e. a repository in GitHub, or the Name of a Source to view more details about it.

The Flux Runtime view

Clicking on Flux Runtime provides information on the GitOps engine, which is continuously reconciling your desired and live state. It provides two different tabs: controllers and CRDs.

Controllers

The controllers tab shows your installed GitOps Toolkit Controllers and their version.

By default flux bootstrap will install the following controllers:

• helm-controller
• kustomize-controller
• notification-controller
• source-controller

For a full description of the controllers, see GitOps ToolKit components in the Flux documentation.

From this view you can see whether the controllers are healthy and which version of a given component is currently deployed.

CRDs

The CRD tab lists the custom resources that the GitOps Toolkit Controllers use. This helps you see what resources you will be able to create.

Exploring the flux-system deployment

Let's explore the flux-system kustomization. Navigate back to the Applications view and click on the flux-system object.

After a few moments loading the data, you should see similar to the above screenshot. From here you can see key information about how this resource is defined: which Source it is reading from, the latest applied commit, the exact path with the Source repository that is being deployed, and the Interval in which Flux will look to reconcile any difference between the declared and live state - i.e. if a kubectl patch had been applied on the cluster, it would effectively be reverted. If a longer error message was being reported by this object, you would be able to see it in its entirety on this page.

Underneath the summary information are four tabs:

• Details (default) is a table view which shows all the Kubernetes objects (including flux objects, deployments, pods, services, etc) managed and deployed through this kustomization.
• Events (shown below) shows any related Kubernetes events to help you diagnose issues and understand health over time.
• Reconciliation Graph (shown below) provides a directional graph alternative to the Details view to help you understand how the various objects relate to each other.
• Dependencies provides a directional graph that helps you understand dependencies between objects, if there are any. This helps you make sure that your automations are set up in the correct order.
• Yaml (shown below) provides a raw dump on the current object as it currently exists inside your cluster. Note that this will be different from what's in your gitops repository, since this yaml view will contain the current status of the object.

Events tab

Reconciliation Graph tab

Yaml tab

Source details view

Finally lets look at the Source in more detail - go back to the Details tab, and click GitRepository/flux-system from the summary at the top of the page.

As with an Application detail view, you can see key information about how the resource is defined. Then beneath alongside the Events tab, is a Related Automations view. This shows all the kustomization objects which have this object as their Source.

Part 2 - Deploying and viewing podinfo application

Now that you have a feel for how to navigate the dashboard. Let's deploy a new application and explore that as well. In this section we will use the podinfo sample web application.

Deploying podinfo

1. Clone or navigate back to your git repository where you have bootstrapped Flux, for example:

   git clone https://github.com/$GITHUB_USER/fleet-infra
   cd fleet-infra

2. Create a GitRepository Source for podinfo

   flux create source git podinfo \
     --url=https://github.com/stefanprodan/podinfo \
     --branch=master \
     --interval=30s \
     --export > ./clusters/my-cluster/podinfo-source.yaml

3. Commit and push the podinfo-source to the fleet-infra repository

   git add -A && git commit -m "Add podinfo source"
   git push

4. Create a kustomization to build and apply the podinfo manifest

   flux create kustomization podinfo \
     --target-namespace=flux-system \
     --source=podinfo \
     --path="./kustomize" \
     --prune=true \
     --interval=5m \
     --export > ./clusters/my-cluster/podinfo-kustomization.yaml

5. Commit and push the podinfo-kustomization to the fleet-infra repository

   git add -A && git commit -m "Add podinfo kustomization"
   git push

View the application in Weave GitOps

Flux will detect the updated fleet-infra and add podinfo. If we navigate back to the dashboard you should see the podinfo application appear.

Click on podinfo and you will see details about the deployment, including that there is 1 pod available.

Customize podinfo

To customize a deployment from a repository you don’t control, you can use Flux in-line patches. The following example shows how to use in-line patches to change the podinfo deployment.

1. Add the patches section as shown below to the field spec of your podinfo-kustomization.yaml file so it looks like this:

   ./clusters/my-cluster/podinfo-kustomization.yaml

   ---
   apiVersion: kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta2
   kind: Kustomization
   metadata:
     name: podinfo
     namespace: flux-system
   spec:
     interval: 60m0s
     path: ./kustomize
     prune: true
     sourceRef:
       kind: GitRepository
       name: podinfo
     targetNamespace: flux-system
     patches:
       - patch: |-
           apiVersion: autoscaling/v2beta2
           kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
           metadata:
             name: podinfo
           spec:
             minReplicas: 3
         target:
           name: podinfo
           kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler

2. Commit and push the podinfo-kustomization.yaml changes:

   git add -A && git commit -m "Increase podinfo minimum replicas"
   git push

3. Navigate back to the dashboard and you will now see 2 newly created pods

   

Suspend updates

Suspending updates to a kustomization allows you to directly edit objects applied from a kustomization, without your changes being reverted by the state in Git.

To suspend updates for a kustomization, from the details page, click on the suspend button at the top, and you should see it be suspended:

This shows in the applications view with a yellow warning status indicating it is now suspended

To resume updates, go back to the details page, click the resume button, and after a few seconds reconsolidation will continue:

Complete!

Congratulations 🎉🎉🎉

You've now completed the getting started guide. We would welcome any and all feedback on your experience.