Consul Helm Chart

This repository contains the official HashiCorp Helm chart for installing and configuring Consul on Kubernetes. This chart supports multiple use cases of Consul on Kubernetes depending on the values provided.

For full documentation on this Helm chart along with all the ways you can use Consul with Kubernetes, please see the Consul and Kubernetes documentation.

Prerequisites

To use the charts here, Helm must be installed in your Kubernetes cluster. Setting up Kubernetes and Helm and is outside the scope of this README. Please refer to the Kubernetes and Helm documentation.

The versions required are:

• Helm 2.10+ - This is the earliest version of Helm tested. It is possible it works with earlier versions but this chart is untested for those versions.
• Kubernetes 1.9+ - This is the earliest version of Kubernetes tested. It is possible that this chart works with earlier versions but it is untested. Other versions verified are Kubernetes 1.10, 1.11.

Usage

For now, we do not host a chart repository. To use the charts, you must download this repository and unpack it into a directory. Either download a tagged release or use git checkout to a tagged release. Assuming this repository was unpacked into the directory consul-helm, the chart can then be installed directly:

helm install ./consul-helm

Please see the many options supported in the values.yaml file. These are also fully documented directly on the Consul website.

Testing

The Helm chart ships with both unit and acceptance tests.

The unit tests don't require any active Kubernetes cluster and complete very quickly. These should be used for fast feedback during development. The acceptance tests require a Kubernetes cluster with a configured kubectl. Both require Bats and helm to be installed and available on the CLI. The unit tests also require the correct version of yq if running locally.

To run the unit tests:

bats ./test/unit

To run the acceptance tests:

bats ./test/acceptance

If the acceptance tests fail, deployed resources in the Kubernetes cluster may not be properly cleaned up. We recommend recycling the Kubernetes cluster to start from a clean slate.

Note: There is a Terraform configuration in the test/terraform/ directory that can be used to quickly bring up a GKE cluster and configure kubectl and helm locally. This can be used to quickly spin up a test cluster for acceptance tests. Unit tests do not require a running Kubernetes cluster.