Show HN: GitOps Template for Kubernetes

Hello HN, we’re Philip Louis from Glasskube (https://github.com/glasskube/glasskube). We are working on a package manager for Kubernetes to simplify the packaging of complex applications with multiple dependencies, ensuring they are installed and kept up-to-date across multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Nowadays, it is best practice to use Git as a revision control system for your Kubernetes configurations. Update automation workflows like Renovate or Dependabot can create pull requests for new versions of Docker images and Helm charts, but ensuring these new package versions work is still a manual task. By using the central (or a private) Glasskube repository (https://github.com/glasskube/packages) together with our Renovate integration (https://docs.renovatebot.com/modules/manager/glasskube/), you can ensure that new package versions will run through our Minikube-based CI workflows before they get published—similar to how the Homebrew core tap works. We’ve just introduced readiness checks for manifest-based deployments and utilize the flux-helm-controller to wait for a Helm release to succeed.

Dependencies are resolved by our package controller. These dependencies can either be cluster-scoped (installed in the recommended namespace, e.g., operators wird CRDs) or namespace-scoped components of a package (e.g., a database or Redis cache). In such cases, we will prefix resources with the dependent package name to ensure multiple packages can use the same dependencies without naming conflicts (we use Kustomize on a virtual filesystem for this).

Glasskube packages can currently be Helm charts (from an OCI or Helm repository) or manifests, which are mostly built using Kustomize’s overlay approach.

Since neither the overlay approach (using Kustomize) nor Helm’s limited templating functionality will help us and other Kubernetes users scale to more complex packages, we are considering creating a more programmatic approach to package creation, similar to Timoni. Currently, KCL is our frontrunner (https://github.com/glasskube/glasskube/discussions/1018), as it already integrates well with the Kubernetes ecosystem.

We would appreciate if you give our GitOps template a try. It also works work existing Kubernetes clusters if just want to use GitOps for some applications. Just make sure that the argocd and glasskube-system namespaces are not yet in use. See: https://github.com/glasskube/gitops-template/