Deploy a GitOps application using FluxCD

This tutorial demonstrates how to setup a GitOps application using FluxCD. In this tutorial, the application will be deployed onto the same cluster that Dispatch is installed on.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you have followed the steps on the following pages:

Dispatch Installation

Setup credentials

First, we need to create credentials that FluxCD can use. You can use either the Dispatch interface or the CLI for this.

Using the CLI

Run the CLI command to create a service account and then login:

dispatch serviceaccount create builder
dispatch login github --service-account=builder --token $GITHUB_TOKEN --user $GITHUB_USERNAME

Replace $GITHUB_TOKEN and $GITHUB_USERNAME with your Github token and username, respectively.

The Dispatch CLI will output the name of the Kubernetes secret that was created. Copy this for the next step.

Using the interface

To login via the web interface, navigate to the Dispatch interface wherever you have it deployed.

Click on the Continuous Integration (CI) tab on the sidebar, and then click on the Secrets tab. Click Create Secret to create a new secret.

Fill in the form to login to your Github, GitLab, or Bitbucket account and copy the name of the secret you created.

Create the repository

Now that we have logged in, we can create the GitOps repository to deploy our application:

dispatch cd gitops-repository create --repository-url $REPOSITORY_URL --scm-secret $SCM_SECRET my-app

Replace $SCM_SECRET with the secret name from the previous step. Replace $REPOSITORY_URL with the URL to the repository you want to deploy. You can also set the --path flag to deploy from a non-root directory or --revision flags to deploy from a non-default directory.

Checking deployment status

In the previous step, the Dispatch CLI creates a GitopsRepository object called my-app. Once this object is created, the Dispatch repository-controller creates an Addon and GitRepository object. The Addon object deploys Flux for your application, and the GitRepository object configures Flux.

We can check the deployment status of Flux by checking the created addon. It will be an addon called flux in the same namespace as your application, we should see that the addon has been deployed:

$ kubectl get addon flux
NAME   READY   STAGE      REVISION
flux   true    deployed

Next, we can check the created GitRepository:

$ kubectl get gitrepository my-app
NAME     URL                                                     READY   STATUS                                                              AGE
my-app   https://github.com/mesosphere/gitopsdemo.git   True    Fetched revision: master/93fb3583190384c77efbf90730375e1e38387569   19m

If your application has not deployed correctly, you can inspect it by using kubectl describe, which will show any errors that Flux encountered deploying your application:

$ kubectl describe gitrepository my-app
Name:         my-app
Namespace:    default
...
Events:
  Type    Reason  Age                 From               Message
  ----    ------  ----                ----               -------
  Normal  error   12m (x16 over 14m)  source-controller  unable to clone 'https://github.com/mesosphere/gitopsdemo.git', error: remote repository is empty

Deploying with FluxCD