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Getting Started on Kubernetes

To install the Consul release controller you need the following prerequisites:

  • Kubernetes
  • Cert Manager (for creating the TLS certificate to enable SSL on the controller)
  • Consul with the Connect feature enabled (Consul Release Controller relies on Consul Service Mesh)
  • Prometheus / Grafana (for querying service health and displaying dashboards)

For more information on the prequisites, please see the prerequisites documentation.

This guide assumes that you have a cluster with the pre-requisites installed. You can also find details on how to setup a dev environment on your local machine using Shipyard and Docker

Installing Consul Release Controller​

Consul release controller can be installed to your Kubernetes cluster using the Helm chart, you can add the Helm chart repo using the following command.

helm repo add release-controller https://nicholasjackson.io/consul-release-controller/

To test that the repo has been correctly added you can use the following command.

helm search repo release-controller --versions

You should see the available versions output

NAME                                            CHART VERSION   APP VERSION
release-controller/consul-release-controller    0.0.6           0.0.6

The Helm chart is configurable with a number of settings however this guide assumes that you have installed Consul locally on your Kubernetes cluster using the recommended secure settings with TLS and ACLs enabled.

Official Consul Helm chart values.yaml
global:
  acls:
    manageSystemACLs: true
controller:
  enabled: true
acls:
  enabled: true

To install using the command to install the release controller:

helm install consul-release-controller \
  release-controller/consul-release-controller \
  -n consul \
  --set "autoEncrypt.enabled=true" \
  --set "acls.enabled=true"

The controller will be installed into the namespace consul with the default options setting the agent certificate and the ACL token from the Consul Kubernetes controller

note: The release controller shares secrets with the main Consul install, ensure that you install it into the same namespace where the Consul helm is installed.

NAME: consul-release-controller
LAST DEPLOYED: Tue Feb 15 17:12:31 2022
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1

For custom configuration please see all the configurable options in the Helm Values

You can validate that the controller has been successfully installed and is running by querying the Kubernetes pods, you should see a single container for the release controller.

kubectl get deployments consul-release-controller -n consul
NAME                        READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
consul-release-controller   1/1     1            1           53s