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.

Please see the consul-k8s project for the various ways that Consul integrates with Kubernetes. This Helm chart installs and configures consul-k8s in some cases.

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.

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. 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 charts are tested in two forms: Bats tests and helm test tests. The Bats tests test changing Helm chart values and the effect on the install. The helm test tests verify that a deployed chart appears healthy.

To run the Bats test: kubectl must be configured locally to be authenticated to a running Kubernetes cluster with Helm installed. With that in place, just run bats:

bats ./test

If the 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 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.