renovate VS flux2

This month, I gave a talk with my Zenika colleague Lise at the DevoxxFR conference about Renovate and Dependabot, two great tools to help you automatize and upgrade your dependencies.

There is no built-in Renovate Bot on a self-hosted GitLab. What can we do to set it up and enjoy all the benefits of automatic dependency updates?

> Yes, it is awesome until you have to sysadmin it, apply updates, patch it, fix security holes, etc. I am not saying all self-hosted solutions are like that. There are exceptions. However, the majority of open-source self-hosted solutions require a lot of extra work.

I'm currently self-hosting 10 different applications on my local server, which represents everything I've ever seen that looked fun or useful to me. Every one of them had a Docker image with an example compose file, which means updating them just requires periodically running Renovate [0] on the repo that stores all my compose files and then running a script that docker compose pulls the updates. It takes maybe 10 minutes every other week, and is actually kinda fun.

It helps that all the apps are only accessible from within my VPN, so I'm not too worried about fixing security updates within a tiny time window.

[0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

This is a big deal! Where did you read this? I found:

https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/discussions/26917

Renovate is an automated dependency management tool that can be used to keep your dependencies up-to-date. It can be configured to automatically create pull requests to update your dependencies, and it supports a wide range of package managers and platforms.

To get started with Mend Renovate, the comprehensive official documentation provides detailed instructions on installation, configuration, and best practices. Additionally, the Mend Renovate community forum offers a platform for users to connect, share experiences, and access the collective knowledge base.

It is a good practice to keep software up to date. To track changes in upstream software, we can utilize automatic dependency tracking systems such as Dependabot or Renovate. This is a broad topic and requires a separate article to be covered. If you would like to read about it, please vote in the comments section below.

So do other forges: I have Renovate [0] set up on my self-hosted Forgejo and it's worked great so far.

[0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

KOM operates within kubernetes environments where Flux or ArgoCD is installed.

Given the team had already adopted GitOps and were familiar with deployments powered by Helm Releases and Flux, we wanted to move the provisioning of the infrastructure to be part of the same process of creating the service and its continuous deployment.

Your GitHub action can trigger a helm chart, or series thereof, or other infra tools. Declarative specifications, triggered procedurally with the context of the branch’s latest build. We use this pattern quite extensively for preview app workflows.

As of a year ago this is possible in a fully declarative way with Flux 2, but there’s a lot more moving parts and security footguns - and the idea that the maintenance of this project has lost one of its primary sponsors is worrying at best.

https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/831

https://blog.kluctl.io/introducing-the-template-controller-a...

FluxCD - FluxCD is another popular GitOps tool that allows developers to use a Git repository as the sole source of configuration. Flux automatically ensures that the state of the Kubernetes cluster is synchronized with the configuration in the Git repository. It supports automatic updates, meaning Flux can monitor Docker image repositories for new images and push updates to the cluster.

#!/bin/bash aws eks update-kubeconfig --name $CLUSTER_NAME --region $AWS_REGION flux_installed=$(kubectl api-resources | grep flux) if [ -z "$flux_installed" ]; then echo "flux is not installed" curl -s https://fluxcd.io/install.sh | sudo bash flux bootstrap github \ --owner=$GH_USER_NAME \ --repository=$FLUX_REPO_NAME \ --path="clusters/$ENVIRONMENT/$CLUSTER_NAME/bootstrap" \ --branch=main \ --personal else echo "flux is installed" fi

Flux CD enables continuous deployment to Kubernetes through GitOps by syncing Git repositories with Kubernetes clusters. Flux CD enables GitOps for Kubernetes through source control integration. It manages Kubernetes manifests as code and syncs git repo changes to clusters. Flux automates checks, deployments, and updates within clusters.

FluxCD is a GitOps tool developed by Weaveworks that allows you to implement continuous and progressive delivery of your applications on Kubernetes. It is a CNCF graduated project that offers a set of controllers to monitor Git repositories and reconciles the cluster's actual state with the desired state defined by manifests committed in the repo.

From here, we can explore other developments and tutorials on Kubernetes, such as o11y or observability (PLG, ELK, ELF, TICK, Jaeger, Pyroscope), service mesh (Linkerd, Istio, NSM, Consul Connect, Cillium), and progressive delivery (ArgoCD, FluxCD, Spinnaker).

Instead, we will create a single long-lived cluster, and deploy our application in different namespaces. There are a bunch of ways to do that - see ArgoCD, Flux, custom internal tooling, or other solutions (we use our own product). That way, we: