FreeLight Helm Charts

The FreeLight Helm Charts repository provides a collection of Helm charts for deploying FreeLight applications into Kubernetes clusters.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.20+
• Helm 3.x+
• Terraform (optional)
• Postgres
• Redis, Valkey, or Microsoft Garnet

Helm Deployment

A proper helm chart repo is still in the process of being developed, please pardon our dust. This assumes you have a Kubernetes cluster setup and Helm installed. If you do not, see the Setting up the Cluster section below.

To deploy the Helm Charts, enter:

git clone https://github.com/OurFreeLight/FreeLightHelmCharts.git

Navigate into the root directory of this repo, create a .env file and put in the values that match best for your system, then enter:

./install.sh

This will install the helm chart onto your cluster.

Setting up the Cluster

If you do not have a Kubernetes cluster setup, you can use this repo to setup a cluster using Terraform.

The FreeLight Helm Charts repo contains terraform modules that can setup a cluster in several ways. The modules are located in the tf/ directory. The modules are:

• gcp

To get started, clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/OurFreeLight/FreeLightHelmCharts.git

Then, change into the tf directory:

cd FreeLightHelmCharts/tf

Then, change into the directory of the module you want to use. For example:

cd gcp

Create a new custom.tfvars file and add the following:

gcp_project_id           = "YOUR_GCP_PROJECT_ID"
gcp_credentials_file     = "PATH_TO_YOUR_GCP_CREDENTIALS_FILE"
domain                   = "staging.freelight.org"
frontend_deployment_type = "gcs"
backend_deployment_type  = "gke"
k8s_version              = "1.27.4-gke.0"
k8s_type                 = "gke_standard"
gcp_vm_instance_type     = "e2-medium"
#api_static_ip_name      = "freelight-vm-static-ip"
delete_protection        = false

Add any other variables you may need to that file, then goto the GCP section below.

AWS Module

GCP Module

The GCP module will create a Kubernetes cluster in GCP. To use it, you will need to have a GCP account and a project setup. You will also need to have the gcloud command line tool installed.

Compute Engine VMs

Set any other variables you may need in the custom.tfvars file, then run the following commands:

./setup.sh
./deploy.sh

This will create a e2-medium VM instance in GCP. Once the instance is created, WAIT 30 SECONDS for the startup script to finish. You can view the status of the startup script in the VM's Serial Port 1 logs. Once the startup script is finished, SSH into the instance and finish the installation by entering:

/var/run/finish-install.sh

This will finish installing the selected Kubernetes distribution that was set in k8s_type and setup the cluster. The VM will reboot when finished. Once the VM is back up, SSH back into the instance, get your kubeconfig file, and you are ready to deploy FreeLight applications using the Helm Deployment section above.