traefik-helm-chart VS hull

helm chart Traefik Ingress

For an example, consider the NGINX Ingress Controller Helm Chart and the Traefik Ingress Controller Helm Chart. Both of these charts install an IngressController but they have their own set of features, configuration, and operation. While they do similar things, they are not the same. Rather than having to pull a bunch of yaml files from a github repo, you can execute a helm install after telling helm where the definition of the charts comes from for a given application. Helm will then go and fetch all the manifests contained in the chart and populate values into the manifest from its defined defaults merged with any values that you specify as an override (or option). If another version of the application comes out, rather than having to update everything, you can just run helm upgrade to update the release to a newer chart version (which may update the internal application code). If the chart version didn't change, but you need a newer release version, a lot of times this is handled by a version variable that you can specify. You just update that (either on the command line or in a values file) and run helm upgrade to change the manifests that get pushed and automatically your deployments will get updated.

Traefik was deployed using Traefik's chart (https://github.com/traefik/traefik-helm-chart). Reading the default values.yaml file, I understand that the Prometheus metrics endpoint is enabled by default. I can confirm that I see the metrics when I access the pod on port 9100/metrics/.

You can Just use the Traefik V2 Helm Chart https://github.com/traefik/traefik-helm-chart

You can find the CRDs in Traefik's helm chart repo

A thousand times, yes. I've wanted to write this same article. Thanks for saving me the time!

The industry is going to great lengths to avoid writing configuration in any ubiquitous imperative programming language. We're seeing the proliferation of hyper-specialized, clunky declarative languages with sub-par tooling and package ecosystems. In what world are templates acceptable code? I don't mean to pick on anything specific, but this[0] is the most recent example I've come across, and it's far from the most unreadable examples.

[0]: https://github.com/traefik/traefik-helm-chart/blob/master/tr...

I have Traefik 2 as my ingress controller acting as the reverse proxy, deployed via Helm. I am using the Bitnami Helm chart to deploy wordpress.

You can then use helm to remove the old traefik deployment and install from wherever you'd prefer. I used the official traefik helm. I made sure that I copied the values from /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/manifests/traefik.yaml to my values file (retrieved from https://github.com/traefik/traefik-helm-chart/blob/master/traefik/values.yaml). Here I also added the helm operator ports.web.redirectTo: websecure (per u/soundwave_rk).

Traefik Helm chart has 402 stars, but the problem here is that 100 people can use it and they don't add stars since they don't log in to GitHub for it. I don't star Debian packages either.

I installed Traefik by helm. You'll need to install helm on the machine you're running kubectl on, then you can follow their instructions at https://github.com/traefik/traefik-helm-chart to install.

If you are just starting out and decide to go with writing your own Helm Charts I'd like to suggest our HULL Helm Library Chart for that purpose.

With HULL we have proposed an alternative yet Helm based solution a year ago which that tries to do it upside down by first giving you a documented Kubernetes API style full access to each objects configuration. Only on top of that it provides you further advanced options to (re)introduce abstraction into the mix - only if you need them and they actually improve your configuration. Everything takes place in the values.yaml so there is no digging around in the templates folder and everything is in view.

The HULL library Helm chart provides a single common interface to specifying Kubernetes objects within Helm Charts. The interface itself is based on the Kubernetes API schema itself which is integrated as a JSON schema in the HULL chart. Since all objects are defined directly in the values.yaml under the hull key there is no need to create and maintain custom template files when creating objects with HULL, everything happens in the values.yaml.

Good, now proceed by creating a new empty HULL based Helm chart. The steps are documented here but you will create it from scratch here to understand what is needed.

As a reminder, the goal of this tutorial series is to demonstrate how to build Helm charts based on the HULL library chart by recreating the functionality of the original kubernetes-dashboard Helm chart with a HULL based chart from scratch. When you have followed the previous part of this tutorial on setting up a HULL base chart you have created a for now unconfigured Helm chart named kubernetes-dashboard-hull in the 02_setup subfolder of your working directory (we assume that's ~/kubernetes-dashboard-hull here). You can alternatively download the current chart state here and continue from there. Also you should have checked out and extracted the kubernetes-dashboard Helm chart to kubernetes-dashboard in your working directory because examining it will be frequently required.

the ability to specify any CustomResource as a customresource object instance. For CustomResources you additionally need to specify the kind and apiVersion besides the free form spec of your object.

We have built a Helm Library chart named HULL, it provides amongst other features full access to all defined objects and their properties at creation and deployment time. Think of it as an API to specify Kubernetes objects directly in a Helm charts values.yaml. If there is some functionality you want to add or use in a particular scenario you can just configure it and the Kubernetes objects are as you actually want them to be - every aspect can always be tuned at deploy time if needed without you having to get back to the chart creator via PRs, hack the chart or similar methods. All doable with Helm and the HULL library chart, no other tooling required!

We actually proposed an alternative way to solve the problem if you are Helm with our Helm library chart HULL.

It may be worthwhile to look at the recently added examles, these are more advanced chart values.yamls from products we are deploying this way. You can see it can be pretty concise to define your applications structure with HULL in comparison.

Downsides to this is that you would have to write out the full content of your config in the values.yaml and cannot use the templating capabilities any further. Within the values.yaml no templating is allowed (unless you base your chart on this library chart we have created ;) which may be a more advanced topic if you just got started)