bitnamicharts/consul repository overview

⁠Bitnami Secure Images Helm chart for HashiCorp Consul

HashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in your infrastructure.

Overview of HashiCorp Consul⁠

Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

⁠ TL;DR

helm install my-release oci://REGISTRY_NAME/REPOSITORY_NAME/consul

⁠ Introduction

This chart bootstraps a HashiCorp Consul⁠ deployment on a Kubernetes⁠ cluster using the Helm⁠ package manager.

⁠ Before you begin

• Kubernetes 1.23+
• Helm 3.8.0+
• PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure

⁠ Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

helm install my-release oci://REGISTRY_NAME/REPOSITORY_NAME/consul

These commands deploy HashiCorp Consul on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The Parameters⁠ section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

⁠ Configuration and installation details

This section describes credentials, configuration, and other installation options.

⁠ Resource requests and limits

Bitnami charts allow setting resource requests and limits for all containers inside the chart deployment. These are inside the resources value (check parameter table). Setting requests is essential for production workloads and these should be adapted to your specific use case.

To make this process easier, the chart contains the resourcesPreset values, which automatically sets the resources section according to different presets. Check these presets in the bitnami/common chart⁠. However, in production workloads using resourcesPreset is discouraged as it may not fully adapt to your specific needs. Find more information on container resource management in the official Kubernetes documentation⁠.

⁠ Rolling VS Immutable tags⁠

It is strongly recommended to use immutable tags in a production environment. This ensures your deployment does not change automatically if the same tag is updated with a different image.

Bitnami will release a new chart updating its containers if a new version of the main container, significant changes, or critical vulnerabilities exist.

⁠ Prometheus metrics

This chart can be integrated with Prometheus by setting metrics.enabled to true. This will deploy a sidecar container with consul_exporter⁠ in all pods and a metrics service, which can be configured under the metrics.service section. This metrics service will have the necessary annotations to be automatically scraped by Prometheus.

⁠Prometheus requirements

It is necessary to have a working installation of Prometheus or Prometheus Operator for the integration to work. Install the Bitnami Prometheus helm chart⁠ or the Bitnami Kube Prometheus helm chart⁠ to easily have a working Prometheus in your cluster.

⁠Integration with Prometheus Operator

The chart can deploy ServiceMonitor objects for integration with Prometheus Operator installations. To do so, set the value metrics.serviceMonitor.enabled=true. Ensure that the Prometheus Operator CustomResourceDefinitions are installed in the cluster or it will fail with the following error:

no matches for kind "ServiceMonitor" in version "monitoring.coreos.com/v1"

Install the Bitnami Kube Prometheus helm chart⁠ for having the necessary CRDs and the Prometheus Operator.

⁠ Using custom configuration

This helm chart supports to customize the whole configuration file.

You can specify the Hashicorp Consul configuration using the configuration parameter.

In addition to this option, you can also set an external ConfigMap with all the configuration files. This is done by setting the existingConfigmap parameter. Note that this will override the previous option.

⁠ Gateway API

This chart provides support for exposing Hashicorp Consul UI using the Gateway API⁠ and its HTTPRoute resource. If you have a Gateway controller installed on your cluster, such as APISIX, Contour, Envoy Gateway, NGINX Gateway Fabric or Kong Ingress Controller you can utilize the Gateway controller to serve your application. To enable Gateway API integration, set httpRoute.enabled to true. The Gateway to be used can be customized by setting the httpRoute.parentRefs parameter. By default, it will reference a Gateway named gateway in the same namespace as the release.

You can specify the list of hostnames to be mapped to the deployment using the httpRoute.hostnames parameter. Additionally, you can customize the rules used to route the traffic to the service by modifying the httpRoute.matches and httpRoute.filters parameters or adding new rules using the httpRoute.extraRules parameter.

This chart also supports creating a BackendTLSPolicy to define the SNI the Gateway should use to connect to the Hashicorp Consul UI backend pods and how the certificate served by these pods should be verified. To do so, set the backendTLSPolicy.enabled parameter to true. Please note it's required to secure traffic using TLS so you need to also set tls.existingSecret to reference a secret containing the TLS certificates used by the Hashicorp Consul UI.

⁠ Ingress

This chart provides support for Ingress resources. If you have an ingress controller installed on your cluster, such as nginx-ingress-controller⁠ or contour⁠ you can utilize the ingress controller to serve your application.

To enable ingress integration, please set ingress.enabled to true.

⁠Hosts

Most likely you will only want to have one hostname that maps to this ASP.NET Core installation. If that's your case, the property ingress.hostname will set it. However, it is possible to have more than one host. To facilitate this, the ingress.extraHosts object can be specified as an array. You can also use ingress.extraTLS to add the TLS configuration for extra hosts.

For each host indicated at ingress.extraHosts, please indicate a name, path, and any annotations that you may want the ingress controller to know about.

For annotations, please see this document⁠. Not all annotations are supported by all ingress controllers, but this document does a good job of indicating which annotation is supported by many popular ingress controllers.

⁠ Securing traffic using TLS

This chart will facilitate the creation of TLS secrets for use with the ingress controller, however, this is not required. There are three common use cases:

• Helm generates/manages certificate secrets
• User generates/manages certificates separately
• An additional tool (like cert-manager) manages the secrets for the application

In the first two cases, one will need a certificate and a key. We would expect them to look like this:

• certificate files should look like (and there can be more than one certificate if there is a certificate chain)

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAIaCwivkeB5EMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMFYxCzAJBgNV
...
jScrvkiBO65F46KioCL9h5tDvomdU1aqpI/CBzhvZn1c0ZTf87tGQR8NK7v7
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

• keys should look like:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEogIBAAKCAQEAvLYcyu8f3skuRyUgeeNpeDvYBCDcgq+LsWap6zbX5f8oLqp4
...
wrj2wDbCDCFmfqnSJ+dKI3vFLlEz44sAV8jX/kd4Y6ZTQhlLbYc=
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

If you are going to use Helm to manage the certificates, please copy these values into the certificate and key values for a given ingress.secrets entry.

If you are going to manage TLS secrets outside of Helm, please know that you can create a TLS secret (named consul-ui.local-tls for example).

Please see this example⁠ for more information.

⁠Enable TLS encryption

TLS encription can be configured by setting tls.enabled to true. This will generate self-signed certificates and configure Consul tls.defaults with their location. For production environments, we recommend using your own certificates by setting the value tls.existingSecret.

If you would like to configure additional TLS settings, the configuration can be overwritten using the value tls.configuration and tls.existingConfigmap. For example:

tls:
  configuration: |-
  {
    "defaults": {
        "ca_file": "/opt/bitnami/consul/certs/ca.crt",
        "cert_file": "/opt/bitnami/consul/certs/tls.crt",
        "key_file": "/opt/bitnami/consul/certs/tls.key",
        "verify_incoming": true,
        "verify_outgoing": true,
        "verify_server_hostname": true,
     },
    "https": {
      ...
     }
  }

### <a id="metrics"></a> Metrics

The chart can optionally start a metrics exporter endpoint on port `9107` for [prometheus](https://prometheus.io). The data exposed by the endpoint is intended to be consumed by a prometheus chart deployed within the cluster and as such the endpoint is not exposed outside the cluster.

### <a id="adding-extra-environment-variables"></a> Adding extra environment variables

In case you want to add extra environment variables (useful for advanced operations like custom init scripts), you can use the `extraEnvVars` property.

```yaml
extraEnvVars:
  - name: LOG_LEVEL
    value: error

Alternatively, you can use a ConfigMap or a Secret with the environment variables. To do so, use the .extraEnvVarsCM or the extraEnvVarsSecret properties.

⁠ Setting Pod's affinity

This chart allows you to set your custom affinity using the affinity parameter. Find more information about Pod's affinity in the kubernetes documentation⁠.

As an alternative, you can use of the preset configurations for pod affinity, pod anti-affinity, and node affinity available at the bitnami/common⁠ chart. To do so, set the podAffinityPreset, podAntiAffinityPreset, or nodeAffinityPreset parameters.

⁠ Sidecars and Init Containers

If you have a need for additional containers to run within the same pod as MongoDB®, you can do so via the sidecars config parameter. Simply define your container according to the Kubernetes container spec.

sidecars:
  - name: your-image-name
    image: your-image
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    ports:
      - name: portname
       containerPort: 1234

Similarly, you can add extra init containers using the initContainers parameter.

initContainers:
  - name: your-image-name
    image: your-image
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    ports:
      - name: portname
        containerPort: 1234

⁠ Backup and restore

To back up and restore Helm chart deployments on Kubernetes, you need to back up the persistent volumes from the source deployment and attach them to a new deployment using Velero⁠, a Kubernetes backup/restore tool. Find the instructions for using Velero in this guide⁠.

⁠ FIPS parameters

The FIPS parameters only have effect if you are using images from the Bitnami Secure Images catalog⁠.

For more information on this new support, please refer to the FIPS Compliance section⁠.

⁠ Persistence

The Bitnami HashiCorp Consul⁠ image stores the HashiCorp Consul data at the /bitnami path of the container.

Persistent Volume Claims are used to keep the data across deployments. This is known to work in GCE, AWS, and minikube. See the Parameters⁠ section to configure the PVC or to disable persistence.

⁠ Adjust permissions of persistent volume mountpoint

As the image run as non-root by default, it is necessary to adjust the ownership of the persistent volume so that the container can write data into it.

By default, the chart is configured to use Kubernetes Security Context to automatically change the ownership of the volume. However this feature does not work in all Kubernetes distributions. As an alternative, this chart supports using an initContainer to change the ownership of the volume before mounting it in the final destination.

You can enable this initContainer by setting volumePermissions.enabled to true.

⁠ Parameters

The following subsections list global, common, and component-specific parameters.

⁠ Global parameters

⁠ Common parameters

⁠ HashiCorp Consul parameters

Note: the README for this chart is longer than the DockerHub length limit of 25000, so it has been trimmed. The full README can be found at https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-tanzu/bitnami-secure-images/bitnami-secure-images/services/bsi-app-doc/apps-charts-consul-index.html⁠