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Version: 0.16.0

Installing Weave GitOps​

Before you begin​

We will provide a complete walk-through of getting Flux installed and Weave GitOps configured. However, if you have:

  • an existing cluster bootstrapped Flux version >= 0.32.0 🎉
  • followed our installation doc to configure access to the Weave GitOps dashboard then install Weave GitOps 👏

Then you can skip ahead to the Weave GitOps overview 🏃 but note ⚠️ you may need to alter commands where we are committing files to GitHub ⚠️.

To follow along, you will need the following:

Install Flux​

Weave GitOps is an extension to Flux and therefore requires that Flux 0.32 or later has already been installed on your Kubernetes cluster. Full documentation is available at: https://fluxcd.io/docs/installation/.

This version of Weave GitOps is tested against the following Flux releases:

  • 0.32
  • 0.33
  • 0.34
  • 0.35
  • 0.36

  1. Install the flux CLI

    brew install fluxcd/tap/flux

    For other installation methods, see the relevant Flux documentation.

  2. Export your credentials

    export GITHUB_TOKEN=<your-token>
    export GITHUB_USER=<your-username>

  3. Check your Kubernetes cluster

    flux check --pre

    The output is similar to:

    ► checking prerequisites
    ✔ kubernetes 1.22.2 >=1.20.6
    ✔ prerequisites checks passed

  4. Install Flux onto your cluster with the flux bootstrap command

    flux bootstrap github \
      --owner=$GITHUB_USER \
      --repository=fleet-infra \
      --branch=main \
      --path=./clusters/my-cluster \
      --personal

Full installation documentation including how to work with other Git providers is available here.

The bootstrap command above does the following:

  • Create a git repository fleet-infra on your GitHub account
  • Add Flux component manifests to the repository
  • Deploy Flux Components to your Kubernetes Cluster
  • Configure Flux components to track the path /clusters/my-cluster/ in the repository

Install Weave GitOps​

For this guide we will use the cluster user, for complete documentation including how to configure an OIDC provider see the documentation here.

gitops CLI​

Weave GitOps includes a command-line interface to help users create and manage resources.

Installation options

The gitops CLI is currently supported on Mac (x86 and Arm), and Linux - including Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Windows support is a planned enhancement.

There are multiple ways to install the gitops CLI:

curl --silent --location "https://github.com/weaveworks/weave-gitops/releases/download/v0.16.0/gitops-$(uname)-$(uname -m).tar.gz" | tar xz -C /tmp
sudo mv /tmp/gitops /usr/local/bin
gitops version

Deploying Weave GitOps​

  1. Clone your git repository where Flux has been bootstrapped.

    git clone https://github.com/$GITHUB_USER/fleet-infra
    cd fleet-infra

  2. Run the following command which will create a HelmRepository and HelmRelease to deploy Weave GitOps

    PASSWORD="<your password>"
    gitops create dashboard ww-gitops \
      --password=$PASSWORD \
      --export > ./clusters/my-cluster/weave-gitops-dashboard.yaml
danger

This command stores a hash of a password. While this is relatively safe for demo and testing purposes it is recommend that you look at more secure methods of storing secrets (such as Flux's SOPS integration) for production systems.

More guidance and alternative login methods can be found in Securing access to the dashboard.

  1. Commit and push the weave-gitops-dashboard.yaml to the fleet-infra repository

    git add -A && git commit -m "Add Weave GitOps Dashboard"
    git push

  2. Validate that Weave GitOps and Flux are installed

    kubectl get pods -n flux-system

    You should see something similar to:

    NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
    helm-controller-5bfd65cd5f-gj5sz           1/1     Running   0          10m
    kustomize-controller-6f44c8d499-s425n      1/1     Running   0          10m
    notification-controller-844df5f694-2pfcs   1/1     Running   0          10m
    source-controller-6b6c7bc4bb-ng96p         1/1     Running   0          10m
    ww-gitops-weave-gitops-86b645c9c6-k9ftg    1/1     Running   0          5m
info

There's many other things you can configure in the weave gitops helm chart. For a reference, see our value file reference.

Next steps​

In our following Get Started document, we will walk you through logging into the GitOps Dashboard and deploying an application.