Create a Customer
To begin, log in (or create an account) on console.replicated.com. If you already have an account on vendor.replicated.com, you can use it here too. After signing up and activating your account, you’ll be presented with the opportunity to create a new customer. Here we’ll be using ‘ATestCustomer’.
Navigate To Ship
The Ship product page can be found through the ‘Products’ dropdown.
If you haven’t visited before, you’ll see a prompt to get started with Release Channels.
Get Started With Release Channels
By default, three release channels are created - Stable, Beta and Nightly. We’ll start with a release on the Nightly channel. Once we’ve done some testing, we’ll promote it to Beta.
Editing a Release
A Ship release is a yaml file describing the assets to include, the configuration options to present to the installer, and what text to display at runtime. We’ll use the builtin editor on console to get started.
There are three sections to the Ship yaml - assets, config, and lifecycle.
Assets
assets:
v1:
- inline:
contents: |
#!/bin/sh
mkdir -p ./installer/gitlab
curl -o gitlab.tar.gz https://gitlab.com/charts/gitlab/-/archive/e57c8ccbde6c2c6ef0f3eea6cb23411ae4cafc56/gitlab-e57c8ccbde6c2c6ef0f3eea6cb23411ae4cafc56.tar.gz
tar xzvf -C ./installer/gitlab/gitlab.tar.gz
helm dependencies update
helm upgrade --install gitlab . \
--timeout 600 \
--set global.hosts.domain={{repl config "domain_name"}} \
{{repl if {{repl config "external_ip"}} }}--set global.hosts.externalIP={{repl config "external_ip"}}{{end}} \
--set gitlab.migrations.initialRootPassword={{repl config "gitlab_root_password"}} \
--set certmanager-issuer.email={{repl config "certificate_email"}} \
{{repl if {{repl config "external_postgres"}} }} --set global.psql.host={{repl config "postgres_host"}} \
--set global.psql.password.secret={{repl config "postgres_k8s_secret_name"}} \
--set global.psql.password.key={{repl config "postgres_password"}} {{repl end}} \
{{repl if {{repl config "redis_ha"}} }}--set redis.enabled=false --set redis-ha.enabled=true{{repl end}}
dest: ./gitlab/scripts/install.sh
mode: 0777
The assets section describes the files that ship will create when run. There are two types of assets currently supported in Ship, though we’ll only be using inline here. inline assets create templated files at the destination location, while docker assets do the same with exported Docker images. For the purposes of this demo, we’ll be using public Docker images with no allowance for airgapped installations, but normally we would explicitly include all the Docker images within the Ship yaml.
Config
config:
v1:
- name: config_options
title: Gitlab Configuration Options
description: The options required by GitLab
items:
- name: domain_name
title: Domain Name
description: Specify a domain which will contain records to resolve gitlab, registry, and minio to the appropriate IP for your chart
type: text
required: true
- name: external_ip
title: External IP
description: If you plan to manually configure your DNS records they should all point to a static IP. For example if you choose example.local and you have a static IP of 10.10.10.10, then gitlab.example.local, registry.example.local and minio.example.local should all resolve to 10.10.10.10.
type: text
required: false
- name: gitlab_root_password
title: Gitlab Root Password
description: The initial root password for GitLab.
type: password
required: true
- name: certificate_email
title: Certificate Email
description: The email to associate with the letsencrypt certificates generated by cert-manager.
type: text
required: true
- name: external_postgres
title: Use an External Postgres Database
type: bool
required: true
- name: postgres_host
title: External Postgres Host
description: The hostname of the external postgres instance GitLab should use
type: text
when: '{{repl ConfigOptionEquals "external_postgres" "1"}}'
required: true
- name: postgres_k8s_secret_name
title: External Postgres Kubernetes Secret Name
description: The name of the Kubernetes secret Postgres should use
type: text
when: '{{repl ConfigOptionEquals "external_postgres" "1"}}'
required: true
- name: postgres_password
title: External Postgres Password
description: The key of the password for the external postgres instance GitLab should use
type: password
when: '{{repl ConfigOptionEquals "external_postgres" "1"}}'
required: true
- name: redis_ha
title: Redis-ha
description: Use high availibility Redis-ha
type: bool
The configuration section uses the same layout and structure as that of Replicated, and is greatly expanded upon here. There is one exception - ‘when’ fields can only be templatable strings. We’ll use it to determine what settings the user would like for their GitLab installation.
Lifecycle
lifecycle:
v1:
- message:
contents: |
This tool will prepare assets so you can deploy GitLab-Enterpise
to your existing Kubernetes cluster
- config: {}
- render: {}
- message:
contents: |
GitLab is ready to deploy to your kubernetes cluster.
If you have Helm configured locally, you can
run the following command to deploy GitLab to
your kubernetes cluster:
bash ./gitlab/scripts/install.sh
- message:
level: warn
contents: |
A state file has been written to {{repl Installation "state_file_path" }} -- please store it
somewhere safe, you'll need it if you want to recover or update this installation of GitLab.
The lifecycle section is the messaging that will be seen by the end user. Contents will be printed to the screen in order during execution, with render: {} being replaced with the configuration options. Message levels change the color of the rendered text, and can be debug, info (the default), warn or error.
Once we’ve finished editing our yaml, we can create a release from it.
Add Customer To Channel
Before we can test our app, we need to add a customer to the channel. Since Nightly releases shouldn’t be going to production, we’ll add ATestCustomer.
Next Steps
Now that’s we’ve created and shipped the first version of our application, continue to the next section to learn how an enterprise customer will install this release.