Deploy the suitecrm helm chart on Rancher

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Deploying a Helm chart on a Kubernetes cluster involves a few steps. First, you'll need a Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher. Pulumi can be used to provision a new cluster or to manage resources in an existing cluster, but for this scenario, we'll assume you want to deploy _SuiteCRM_ on an existing Rancher-managed cluster.

To manage Kubernetes resources with Rancher in Pulumi, we can use the `rancher2` provider. You’ll need to have access to a Rancher server and have the `Helm` catalog enabled in your setup.

The following program demonstrates how to use Pulumi to deploy the SuiteCRM Helm chart into a Kubernetes cluster managed by Rancher:

```typescript
import * as pulumi from "@pulumi/pulumi";
import * as rancher2 from "@pulumi/rancher2";
import * as k8s from "@pulumi/kubernetes";

// Firstly, we create a Pulumi provider for Rancher which requires access to a Rancher server.
const rancherProvider = new rancher2.Provider("my-rancher-provider", {
    // You'll need to replace these with the actual API URL and a token from your Rancher setup.
    apiURL: "https://your-rancher-api.server",
    tokenKey: "token",
});

// If you already have a cluster configured in your Rancher instance, you can reference it:
const rancherCluster = rancher2.getCluster({
    name: "your-rancher-cluster-name",
}, { provider: rancherProvider });

// Using the existing cluster ID, we set up a Kubernetes provider to manage the Kubernetes resources.
const k8sProvider = new k8s.Provider("k8s-provider", {
    kubeconfig: rancherCluster.kubeConfig,
});

// Now we deploy the SuiteCRM Helm chart into our Rancher-managed cluster.
const suiteCRMDeployment = new k8s.helm.v3.Chart("suitecrm", {
    chart: "suitecrm",
    version: "1.2.3", // replace with the desired chart version
    fetchOpts:{
        repo: "https://helm.example.com/", // replace with the Helm repo URL where the chart is located
    },
    // You can also provide additional configuration for the SuiteCRM deployment, if needed.
    values: {
        // Custom values to configure SuiteCRM
    },
}, { provider: k8sProvider });

// Export any of the necessary details of the SuiteCRM deployment.
export const suiteCRMDeploymentName = suiteCRMDeployment.metadata.apply(m => m.name);
```

Let's go over the details of what each part is doing:

1. We import the required Pulumi packages. The `@pulumi/pulumi` package is the core Pulumi package. The `@pulumi/rancher2` package contains the Rancher 2 provider, which allows Pulumi to interact with Rancher. The `@pulumi/kubernetes` package contains the Kubernetes provider and resources.

2. We instantiate the Rancher provider, which requires the URL of your Rancher API server and an API token.

3. With the Rancher provider, we retrieve the cluster configuration using `rancher2.getCluster`. This requires the name of the cluster in your Rancher setup.

4. Using the cluster configuration, we create a Kubernetes provider to manage Kubernetes resources.

5. We deploy the SuiteCRM Helm chart with `k8s.helm.v3.Chart`. We specify the name of the chart, the chart version, and the repository URL of the Helm chart. Additionally, you can provide a `values` object with custom configurations for your SuiteCRM deployment.

6. Lastly, we export the name of the SuiteCRM deployment for your reference.

Before you run this Pulumi program, please ensure you have set up the following prerequisites:

- **Pulumi**: Install Pulumi CLI and set up the Pulumi project and stack.
- **Rancher Access**: Ensure you have access to your Rancher server with an appropriate token.
- **Helm Chart Repository**: Make sure the SuiteCRM Helm chart is available in a repository and you provide its URL.

When you run this Pulumi program with `pulumi up`, it will deploy SuiteCRM to the specified Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster. You can then access SuiteCRM through the service endpoint created by the Helm chart, which may be a LoadBalancer IP or a NodePort, depending on your setup.