Customize Defaults

If you look in the newly created eksdemo directory, you’ll see several files and directories. Specifically, inside the /templates directory, you’ll see:

  • NOTES.txt: The “help text” for your chart. This will be displayed to your users when they run helm install.
  • deployment.yaml: A basic manifest for creating a Kubernetes deployment
  • service.yaml: A basic manifest for creating a service endpoint for your deployment
  • _helpers.tpl: A place to put template helpers that you can re-use throughout the chart

We’re actually going to create our own files, so we’ll delete these boilerplate files

rm -rf ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/
rm ~/environment/eksdemo/Chart.yaml
rm ~/environment/eksdemo/values.yaml

Create a new Chart.yaml file which will describe the chart

cat <<EoF > ~/environment/eksdemo/Chart.yaml
apiVersion: v1
appVersion: "1.0"
description: A Helm chart for EKS Workshop Microservices application
name: eksdemo
version: 0.1.0
EoF

Next we’ll copy the manifest files for each of our microservices into the templates directory as servicename.yaml

#create subfolders for each template type
mkdir -p ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/deployment
mkdir -p ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/service

# Copy and rename frontend manifests
cp ~/environment/ecsdemo-frontend/kubernetes/deployment.yaml ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/deployment/frontend.yaml
cp ~/environment/ecsdemo-frontend/kubernetes/service.yaml ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/service/frontend.yaml

# Copy and rename crystal manifests
cp ~/environment/ecsdemo-crystal/kubernetes/deployment.yaml ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/deployment/crystal.yaml
cp ~/environment/ecsdemo-crystal/kubernetes/service.yaml ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/service/crystal.yaml

# Copy and rename nodejs manifests
cp ~/environment/ecsdemo-nodejs/kubernetes/deployment.yaml ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/deployment/nodejs.yaml
cp ~/environment/ecsdemo-nodejs/kubernetes/service.yaml ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/service/nodejs.yaml

All files in the templates directory are sent through the template engine. These are currently plain YAML files that would be sent to Kubernetes as-is.

Replace hard-coded values with template directives

Let’s replace some of the values with template directives to enable more customization by removing hard-coded values.

Open ~/environment/eksdemo/templates/deployment/frontend.yaml in your Cloud9 editor.

The following steps should be completed seperately for frontend.yaml, crystal.yaml, and nodejs.yaml.

Under spec, find replicas: 1 and replace with the following:

replicas: {{ .Values.replicas }}

Under spec.template.spec.containers.image, replace the image with the correct template value from the table below:

Filename Value
frontend.yaml - image: {{ .Values.frontend.image }}:{{ .Values.version }}
crystal.yaml - image: {{ .Values.crystal.image }}:{{ .Values.version }}
nodejs.yaml - image: {{ .Values.nodejs.image }}:{{ .Values.version }}

Create a values.yaml file with our template defaults

This file will populate our template directives with default values.

cat <<EoF > ~/environment/eksdemo/values.yaml
# Default values for eksdemo.
# This is a YAML-formatted file.
# Declare variables to be passed into your templates.

# Release-wide Values
replicas: 3
version: 'latest'

# Service Specific Values
nodejs:
  image: brentley/ecsdemo-nodejs
crystal:
  image: brentley/ecsdemo-crystal
frontend:
  image: brentley/ecsdemo-frontend
EoF