Platform Apps - a catalogue of apps for Flux CD

This repository has the specification of Flux CD resources for different apps.

The sources directory contains Flux CD sources, like Helm repositories.

The apps directory contains sub directories with Flux CD Helm releases, charts and opinionated chart values.

Usage

In order to implement the resources in this repository you need the following on your implementation side:

• platform-apps.yaml: References this repository as a Flux CD git source and also references the Helm repositores from the sources directory.
• kustomization.yaml

platform-apps.yaml example

---
apiVersion: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1
kind: GitRepository
metadata:
  name: platform-apps-git
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 1m0s
  ref:
    branch: main
  url: https://github.com/dfds/platform-apps
---
apiVersion: kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1
kind: Kustomization
metadata:
  name: platform-apps-sources
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 1m0s
  sourceRef:
    kind: GitRepository
    name: platform-apps-git
  path: ./sources
  prune: true

kustomization.yaml example

This is a standard k8s Kustomization resource where we reference the specific app we want to install with Flux. This will contain a link to the specific app under the apps folder; in this example traefik.

Optionally it can also contain a patches section that includes inline YAML, if we want to patch any of the Helm chart values.

----
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization
resources:
  - https://github.com/dfds/platform-apps/apps/traefik
patches:
  - patch: |-
      apiVersion: helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v2beta1
      kind: HelmRelease
      metadata:
        name: traefik
        namespace: traefik
      spec:
        values:
          ports:
            web:
              nodePort: 31000
            traefik:
              nodePort: 31001

Terraform

In our setup we use the the https://github.com/dfds/infrastructure-modules/tree/master/_sub/compute/k8s-traefik-flux Terraform module to generate the kustomization.yaml files.

Development practices

• Create a feature branch from main branch.
• When you are ready to test your feature in QA, merge it to the qa branch without a pull request.
• When you are ready with your feature, raise a pull request
• Delete your feature branch after merge to main

Merge conflicts

• We have a nightly build than merges main into qa and staging branches.
• Because different feature branches might be updating the same files, we sometimes get merge conflicts.
• These merge conflicts are discovered when the nightly job merges from main to qa.
• These merge conflicts needs to be fixed manually.