Choose your Environment

In this step, you choose where to install Spinnaker. The recommended path is an installation into a Kubernetes cluster

• Kubernetes installation

  Each of Spinnaker’s microservices services are deployed separately. This is highly recommended for use in production.

• Local installations of Debian packages

  Spinnaker is deployed on a single machine. This is ok for smaller Spinnaker deployments, but Spinnaker will be unavailable when it’s being updated. Note it’s often better to use a microk8s/k3s installation to deploy rather than try to deploy a local debian.

• Please see Local git installations from GitHub

  This is for developers contributing to the Spinnaker project.

Kubernetes installation

Kubernetes installations are recommended for most organizations and even for test purposes. Spinnaker is deployed to a namespace in a kubernetes cluster microservice deployed independently.

The base example is available in the monorepo here: https://github.com/spinnaker/spinnaker/tree/main/spinnaker-kustomize with more information and options. To install spinnaker:

1. Make sure kubectl is installed
2. Optionally, configure Kubernetes probes for your Spinnaker services in their deployment manifests (in the ~/spinnaker-kustomize/base/*/deployment.yaml files.
3. Adjust the domains. Look for any example.com reference and replace with your DNS domain.
4. Create a file with the spinnaker kubernetes resources and apply it
   1. kubectl kustomize -o spinnaker.yaml
   2. kubectl apply -f spinnaker.yaml
5. Get the ingress IP address and create DNS entries for your new spinnaker domain to this new entry

REMINDER: This basic setup defaults with a SIMPLE username/password auth. It’s recommended to change this from the default or better yet, use an identity provider (saml/oidc/ldap) solution. The spinnaker project does integration tests today with Keycloak as a known out of the box solution.

Local Debian

Prerequisites

We recommend at least 4 cores and 16GB of RAM.

Overview

The Local Debian installation means Spinnaker will be installed and run on a single machine. We recommend at least 4 cores and 16GB of RAM. Note this is a non-recommended installation but is simple to install. Spinnaker configuration files default to /opt/spinnaker/config. You can copy the files from the spinnaker-kustomize example repo for each service. Services load properties from in the following priority order

• spinnaker.yml
• spinnaker-local.yml
• <service>.yml
• <service>-local.yml

It’s recommended NOT to change the spinnaker.yml or service.yml and instead override their settings in the service local yml files. These base files often are “defaults” or core settings. Base settings can be found in the source code for each service similar to https://github.com/spinnaker/spinnaker/blob/main/front50/front50-web/config/front50.yml path where each service has a <service>/<service>-web/config/<service>.yml file defining defaults.

Note: Local Debian installation requires a recent ubuntu/debian and installation of components like kubectl or the aws cli depending upon deployment targets. They also need a Java 17 JRE installed.

Intended use case

The Local Debian installation is intended for smaller deployments of Spinnaker, however, since all services are on a single machine, there is potential downtime.

Install local dependencies

Ensure that the following are installed on your system:

• git: sudo apt-get install git
• curl: sudo apt-get install curl
• redis-server: sudo apt-get install redis-server
• JDK 17 - JDK (we’re building from source, so a JRE is not sufficient)
• npm/node (version >=16)
• yarn: npm install -g yarn or guide

Further reading

• Spinnaker Architecture for a better understanding of the Distributed installation.

Next steps

Now that your deployment environment is set up, you need to provide Spinnaker with a Persistent Storage source.