Fixing Skaffold Modules With A Deployer Definition

Table of Contents

microservices - This article is part of a series.

Part 1: Production Microservices in .NET -- Introduction

Part 2: The Right Development Environment Eases the Pain

Part 3: Creating and Deploying Our First Microservices Locally

Part 4: Deploying an Ingress and Reverse Proxy

Part 5: This Article

Part 6: Linkerd and mTLS or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mesh

Part 7: Optimizing Skaffold's Local Builds For Dotnet

Part 8: Kubernetes Local Ingress TLS: Enabling HTTPS In Dev

Interlude – Fixing `skaffold.yaml`
#

Remember that Skaffold Bug Alert from the previous article? Let’s address it now by __fixing our Skaffold modules once and for all. All we needed to do originally was add deploy.kubectl: {} to our common/skaffold.yaml. But, because we developed some more, we need to make a few more changes.

Add a deploy.kubectl section to our common/skaffold.yaml file
Uncomment our requires section in root level skaffold.yaml
Remove the build and deploy sections from our root level skaffold.yaml
move the webbff stuff of our deploy and build sections into common/skaffold.yaml and update their paths, etc…

Instead of making you do that, just copy the contents of these files and replace what you have (or you can do it as an exercise if you feel you must be punished):

skaffold.yaml

apiVersion: skaffold/v4beta8
kind: Config
metadata:
  name: main-config
requires:
  - path: ./local/skaffold.yaml
    configs: [local-config]
    activeProfiles:
      - name: local
        activatedBy:
          - local
  - path: ./dev/skaffold.yaml
    configs: [dev-config]
    activeProfiles:
      - name: dev
        activatedBy:
          - dev
  - path: ./stage/skaffold.yaml
    configs: [stage-config]
    activeProfiles:
      - name: stage
        activatedBy:
          - stage
  - path: ./prod/skaffold.yaml
    configs: [ prod-config ]
    activeProfiles:
      - name: prod
        activatedBy:
          - prod   
profiles:
  - name: local
    activation:
      - command: dev
      - env: ENV=local
  - name: dev
    requiresAllActivations: true
    activation:
      - command: dev
      - env: ENV=dev
  - name: stage
    activation:
      - env: ENV=stage
  - name: prod
    activation:
      - env: ENV=prod

common/skaffold.yaml

apiVersion: skaffold/v4beta8
kind: Config
metadata:
  name: common-config
build:
  artifacts:
    - image: hcgaron/identity-service-starter
      context: ../../../
      docker:
        dockerfile: Identity.Service/Dockerfile
    - image: hcgaron/users-service-starter
      context: ../../../
      docker:
        dockerfile: Users.Service/Dockerfile
    - image: hcgaron/web-bff-starter
      context: ../../../
      docker:
        dockerfile: BFF.Web/Dockerfile
manifests:
  rawYaml:
    - ../../manifests/*
deploy:
  kubectl: {}
  helm:
    releases:
      - name: nginx-ingress
        namespace: app
        createNamespace: true
        remoteChart: oci://ghcr.io/nginxinc/charts/nginx-ingress
        version: 1.1.0
        valuesFiles:
          - ../../Helm/nginx-ingress/values.yaml
      - name: identity
        namespace: app
        createNamespace: true
        setValueTemplates:
          image.repository: "{{.IMAGE_REPO_hcgaron_identity_service_starter}}"
          image.tag: "{{.IMAGE_TAG_hcgaron_identity_service_starter}}@{{.IMAGE_DIGEST_hcgaron_identity_service_starter}}"
        setValues:
          image.pullPolicy: "IfNotPresent"
        chartPath: ../../Helm/Identity
        valuesFiles:
          - ../../Helm/Identity/values.yaml
        version: 0.1.0
      - name: users
        namespace: app
        createNamespace: true
        setValueTemplates:
          image.repository: "{{.IMAGE_REPO_hcgaron_users_service_starter}}"
          image.tag: "{{.IMAGE_TAG_hcgaron_users_service_starter}}@{{.IMAGE_DIGEST_hcgaron_users_service_starter}}"
        setValues:
          image.pullPolicy: "IfNotPresent"
        chartPath: ../../Helm/Users
        valuesFiles:
          - ../../Helm/Users/values.yaml
        version: 0.1.0
      - name: webbff
        namespace: app
        createNamespace: true
        setValueTemplates:
          image.repository: "{{.IMAGE_REPO_hcgaron_web_bff_starter}}"
          image.tag: "{{.IMAGE_TAG_hcgaron_web_bff_starter}}@{{.IMAGE_DIGEST_hcgaron_web_bff_starter}}"
        setValues:
          image.pullPolicy: "IfNotPresent"
        chartPath: ../../Helm/WebBFF
        valuesFiles:
          - ../../Helm/WebBFF/values.yaml
        version: 0.1.0

Now if you run skaffold dev -f ./K8S/skaffold/skaffold.yaml, it should not only start up but it should also deploy our Ingress object to do our BFF routing.

Verify by running kubectl get ingress -n app:

And you can still make GET requests to http://web.hg-microservices-blog.com/api/users and http://web.hg-microservices-blog.com/api/auth without issue.

Great - we have fixed our modules. (A little explanation on what we actually did below)

Skaffold Deployers
#

Skaffold deployers are responsible for deploying the final Kubernetes manifests to the cluster. Skaffold supports multiple tools for deploying applications, and the configuration for these deployers is set through the deploy section of the skaffold.yaml file.

When you use a single skaffold.yaml file, technically you don’t need to define a deploy section at all (as long as you are using rawYaml). Skaffold is smart enough to pick a default deployer for you (in my experience it’s always been kubectl, but I don’t know if that’s always the case or if there’s more logic to it). But when using Skaffold modules, no default deployer is chosen for you. So, even though we have defined rawYaml, we need to define the deployer in the common/skaffold.yaml to deploy those rawYaml. That’s what we have done here.