bitnami/consul

HashiCorp Consul Helm Chart

HashiCorp Consul has multiple components, but as a whole, it is a tool for discovering and configuring services in your infrastructure

TL;DR

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm install my-release bitnami/consul

Introduction

This chart bootstraps a HashiCorp Consul deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

Bitnami charts can be used with Kubeapps for deployment and management of Helm Charts in clusters. This Helm chart has been tested on top of Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR). Deploy BKPR to get automated TLS certificates, logging and monitoring for your applications.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.12+
• Helm 3.1.0
• PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm install my-release bitnami/consul

These commands deploy HashiCorp Consul on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The Parameters section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

Tip: List all releases using helm list

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

$ helm delete my-release

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release. Remove also the chart using --purge option:

$ helm delete --purge my-release

Parameters

The following table lists the configurable parameters of the HashiCorp Consul chart and their default values.

Parameter	Description	Default
global.imageRegistry	Global Docker Image registry	nil
global.imagePullSecrets	Global Docker registry secret names as an array	[] (does not add image pull secrets to deployed pods)
global.storageClass	Global storage class for dynamic provisioning	nil

Common parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
nameOverride	String to partially override consul.fullname	nil
fullnameOverride	String to fully override consul.fullname	nil
clusterDomain	Default Kubernetes cluster domain	cluster.local
commonLabels	Labels to add to all deployed objects	nil
commonAnnotations	Annotations to add to all deployed objects	[]
extraDeploy	Array of extra objects to deploy with the release (evaluated as a template)	nil
kubeVersion	Force target Kubernetes version (using Helm capabilities if not set)	nil

HashiCorp Consul parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
image.registry	HashiCorp Consul image registry	docker.io
image.repository	HashiCorp Consul image name	bitnami/consul
image.tag	HashiCorp Consul image tag	{TAG_NAME}
image.pullPolicy	Image pull policy	IfNotPresent
image.pullSecrets	Specify docker-registry secret names as an array	[] (does not add image pull secrets to deployed pods)
image.debug	Specify if debug logs should be enabled	false
datacenterName	HashiCorp Consul datacenter name	dc1
domain	HashiCorp Consul domain	consul
raftMultiplier	Multiplier used to scale key Raft timing parameters	1
gossipKey	Gossip key for all members	nil
tlsEncryptionSecretName	Name of existing secret with TLS encryption data	nil
hostAliases	Add deployment host aliases	[]
configuration	HashiCorp Consul configuration to be injected as ConfigMap	{}
existingConfigmap	Name of existing ConfigMap with HashiCorp Consul configuration	nil
localConfig	Extra configuration that will be added to the default one	nil
command	Override default container command (useful when using custom images)	nil
args	Override default container args (useful when using custom images)	nil
extraEnvVars	Extra environment variables to be set on HashiCorp Consul container	{}
extraEnvVarsCM	Name of existing ConfigMap containing extra env vars	nil
extraEnvVarsSecret	Name of existing Secret containing extra env vars	nil
containerPorts.http	Port to open for HTTP in Consul	8500
containerPorts.dns	Port to open for DNS server in Consul	8600
containerPorts.rcp	Port to open for RCP in Consul	8400
containerPorts.rpcServer	Port to open for RCP Server in Consul	8300
containerPorts.serfLAN	Port to open for Serf LAN in Consul	8301

Statefulset parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
replicaCount	Number of HashiCorp Consul replicas	3
updateStrategy	Update strategy type for the statefulset	RollingUpdate
rollingUpdatePartition	Partition update strategy	nil
priorityClassName	HashiCorp Consul priorityClassName	nil
podManagementPolicy	StatefulSet pod management policy	OrderedReady
podAnnotations	Additional pod annotations	{}
podLabels	Additional pod labels	{}
podAffinityPreset	Pod affinity preset. Ignored if affinity is set. Allowed values: soft or hard	""
podAntiAffinityPreset	Pod anti-affinity preset. Ignored if affinity is set. Allowed values: soft or hard	soft
nodeAffinityPreset.type	Node affinity preset type. Ignored if affinity is set. Allowed values: soft or hard	""
nodeAffinityPreset.key	Node label key to match Ignored if affinity is set.	""
nodeAffinityPreset.values	Node label values to match. Ignored if affinity is set.	[]
affinity	Affinity for pod assignment	{} (evaluated as a template)
nodeSelector	Node labels for pod assignment	{} (evaluated as a template)
tolerations	Tolerations for pod assignment	[] (evaluated as a template)
podSecurityContext.enabled	Enable security context for HashiCorp Consul pods	true
podSecurityContext.fsGroup	Group ID for the volumes of the pod	1001
containerSecurityContext.enabled	HashiCorp Consul Container securityContext	true
containerSecurityContext.runAsUser	User ID for the HashiCorp Consul container	1001
resources.limits	The resources limits for HashiCorp Consul containers	{}
resources.requests	The requested resources for HashiCorp Consul containers	{}
livenessProbe	Liveness probe configuration for HashiCorp Consul	Check values.yaml file
readinessProbe	Readiness probe configuration for HashiCorp Consul	Check values.yaml file
customLivenessProbe	Override default liveness probe	nil
customReadinessProbe	Override default readiness probe	nil
extraVolumeMounts	Optionally specify extra list of additional volumeMounts for hashicorp consul container	[]
extraVolumes	Optionally specify extra list of additional volumes for hashicorp consul container	[]
initContainers	Add additional init containers to the hashicorp consul pods	{} (evaluated as a template)
sidecars	Add additional sidecar containers to the hashicorp consul pods	{} (evaluated as a template)
pdb.create	Enable/disable a Pod Disruption Budget creation	false
pdb.minAvailable	Minimum number/percentage of pods that should remain scheduled	1
pdb.maxUnavailable	Maximum number/percentage of pods that may be made unavailable	nil

Exposure parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
service.enabled	Use a service to access HashiCorp Consul Ui	true
service.port	HashiCorp Consul UI svc port	80
service.type	Kubernetes Service Type	ClusterIP
service.nodePort	Kubernetes node port for HashiCorp Consul UI	""
service.annotations	Annotations for HashiCorp Consul UI service	{} (evaluated as a template)
service.loadBalancerIP	IP if HashiCorp Consul UI service type is LoadBalancer	nil
ingress.enabled	Enable ingress resource for Management console	false
ingress.apiVersion	Force Ingress API version (automatically detected if not set)	“
ingress.path	Ingress path	/
ingress.pathType	Ingress path type	ImplementationSpecific
ingress.certManager	Add annotations for cert-manager	false
ingress.hostname	Default host for the ingress resource	consul-ui.local
ingress.annotations	Ingress annotations	[]
ingress.tls	Enable TLS configuration for the hostname defined at ingress.hostname parameter	false
ingress.existingSecret	Existing secret for the Ingress TLS certificate	nil
ingress.extraHosts[0].name	Additional hostnames to be covered	nil
ingress.extraHosts[0].path	Additional hostnames to be covered	nil
ingress.extraTls[0].hosts[0]	TLS configuration for additional hostnames to be covered	nil
ingress.extraTls[0].secretName	TLS configuration for additional hostnames to be covered	nil
ingress.secrets[0].name	TLS Secret Name	nil
ingress.secrets[0].certificate	TLS Secret Certificate	nil
ingress.secrets[0].key	TLS Secret Key	nil

Persistence parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
persistence.enabled	Enable HashiCorp Consul data persistence using PVC	true
persistence.storageClass	PVC Storage Class for HashiCorp Consul data volume	nil
persistence.annotations	Persistent Volume Claim annotations Annotations	{} (evaluated as a template)
persistence.accessMode	PVC Access Mode for HashiCorp Consul data volume	[ReadWriteOnce]
persistence.size	PVC Storage Request for HashiCorp Consul data volume	8Gi

Volume Permissions parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
volumePermissions.enabled	Enable init container that changes the owner and group of the persistent volume(s) mountpoint to runAsUser:fsGroup	false
volumePermissions.image.registry	Init container volume-permissions image registry	docker.io
volumePermissions.image.repository	Init container volume-permissions image name	bitnami/minideb
volumePermissions.image.tag	Init container volume-permissions image tag	buster
volumePermissions.image.pullPolicy	Init container volume-permissions image pull policy	Always
volumePermissions.image.pullSecrets	Specify docker-registry secret names as an array	[] (does not add image pull secrets to deployed pods)
volumePermissions.resources.limits	Init container volume-permissions resource limits	{}
volumePermissions.resources.requests	Init container volume-permissions resource requests	{}

Metrics parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
metrics.enabled	Start a side-car prometheus exporter	false
metrics.image	Exporter image	bitnami/consul-exporter
metrics.imageTag	Exporter image tag	{TAG_NAME}
metrics.imagePullPolicy	Exporter image pull policy	IfNotPresent
metrics.resources	Exporter resource requests/limit	{}
metrics.podAnnotations	Exporter annotations	{}
metrics.service.type	Kubernetes Service type (consul metrics)	ClusterIP
metrics.service.annotations	Annotations for the services to monitor	{}
metrics.service.loadBalancerIP	loadBalancerIP if redis metrics service type is LoadBalancer	nil
metrics.serviceMonitor.enabled	Create ServiceMonitor Resource for scraping metrics using PrometheusOperator	false
metrics.serviceMonitor.namespace	Namespace which Prometheus is running in	monitoring
metrics.serviceMonitor.interval	Interval at which metrics should be scraped	30s
metrics.serviceMonitor.scrapeTimeout	Specify the timeout after which the scrape is ended	nil
metrics.serviceMonitor.relabellings	Specify Metric Relabellings to add to the scrape endpoint	nil
metrics.serviceMonitor.honorLabels	honorLabels chooses the metric’s labels on collisions with target labels.	false
metrics.serviceMonitor.additionalLabels	Used to pass Labels that are required by the Installed Prometheus Operator	{}
metrics.serviceMonitor.release	Used to pass Labels release that sometimes should be custom for Prometheus Operator	nil

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example,

$ helm install my-release --set domain=consul-domain,gossipKey=secretkey bitnami/consul

The above command sets the HashiCorp Consul domain to consul-domain and sets the gossip key to secretkey.

Alternatively, a YAML file that specifies the values for the above parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

$ helm install my-release -f values.yaml bitnami/consul

Tip: You can use the default values.yaml

Configuration and installation details

Rolling VS Immutable tags

It is strongly recommended to use immutable tags in a production environment. This ensures your deployment does not change automatically if the same tag is updated with a different image.

Bitnami will release a new chart updating its containers if a new version of the main container, significant changes, or critical vulnerabilities exist.

Using custom configuration

This helm chart supports to customize the whole configuration file.

You can specify the Hashicorp Consul configuration using the configuration parameter.

In addition to this option, you can also set an external ConfigMap with all the configuration files. This is done by setting the existingConfigmap parameter. Note that this will override the previous option.

Ingress

This chart provides support for ingress resources. If you have an ingress controller installed on your cluster, such as nginx-ingress or traefik you can utilize the ingress controller to serve your ASP.NET Core application.

To enable ingress integration, please set ingress.enabled to true.

Hosts

Most likely you will only want to have one hostname that maps to this ASP.NET Core installation. If that’s your case, the property ingress.hostname will set it. However, it is possible to have more than one host. To facilitate this, the ingress.extraHosts object can be specified as an array. You can also use ingress.extraTLS to add the TLS configuration for extra hosts.

For each host indicated at ingress.extraHosts, please indicate a name, path, and any annotations that you may want the ingress controller to know about.

For annotations, please see this document. Not all annotations are supported by all ingress controllers, but this document does a good job of indicating which annotation is supported by many popular ingress controllers.

TLS Secrets

This chart will facilitate the creation of TLS secrets for use with the ingress controller, however, this is not required. There are three common use cases:

• Helm generates/manages certificate secrets
• User generates/manages certificates separately
• An additional tool (like kube-lego) manages the secrets for the application

In the first two cases, one will need a certificate and a key. We would expect them to look like this:

• certificate files should look like (and there can be more than one certificate if there is a certificate chain)

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAIaCwivkeB5EMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMFYxCzAJBgNV
...
jScrvkiBO65F46KioCL9h5tDvomdU1aqpI/CBzhvZn1c0ZTf87tGQR8NK7v7
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

• keys should look like:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEogIBAAKCAQEAvLYcyu8f3skuRyUgeeNpeDvYBCDcgq+LsWap6zbX5f8oLqp4
...
wrj2wDbCDCFmfqnSJ+dKI3vFLlEz44sAV8jX/kd4Y6ZTQhlLbYc=
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

If you are going to use Helm to manage the certificates, please copy these values into the certificate and key values for a given ingress.secrets entry.

If you are going to manage TLS secrets outside of Helm, please know that you can create a TLS secret (named consul-ui.local-tls for example).

Please see this example for more information.

Enable TLS encryption between servers

You must manually create a secret containing your PEM-encoded certificate authority, your PEM-encoded certificate, and your PEM-encoded private key.

Take into account that you will need to create a config map with the proper configuration.

If the secret is specified, the chart will locate those files at /opt/bitnami/consul/certs/, so you will want to use the below snippet to configure HashiCorp Consul TLS encryption in your config map:

  "ca_file": "/opt/bitnami/consul/certs/ca.pem",
  "cert_file": "/opt/bitnami/consul/certs/consul.pem",
  "key_file": "/opt/bitnami/consul/certs/consul-key.pem",
  "verify_incoming": true,
  "verify_outgoing": true,
  "verify_server_hostname": true,

After creating the secret, you can install the helm chart specyfing the secret name using tlsEncryptionSecretName=consul-tls-encryption.

Metrics

The chart can optionally start a metrics exporter endpoint on port 9107 for prometheus. The data exposed by the endpoint is intended to be consumed by a prometheus chart deployed within the cluster and as such the endpoint is not exposed outside the cluster.

Adding extra environment variables

In case you want to add extra environment variables (useful for advanced operations like custom init scripts), you can use the extraEnvVars property.

extraEnvVars:
  - name: LOG_LEVEL
    value: error

Alternatively, you can use a ConfigMap or a Secret with the environment variables. To do so, use the .extraEnvVarsCM or the extraEnvVarsSecret properties.

Setting Pod’s affinity

This chart allows you to set your custom affinity using the affinity parameter. Find more information about Pod’s affinity in the kubernetes documentation.

As an alternative, you can use of the preset configurations for pod affinity, pod anti-affinity, and node affinity available at the bitnami/common chart. To do so, set the podAffinityPreset, podAntiAffinityPreset, or nodeAffinityPreset parameters.

Sidecars and Init Containers

If you have a need for additional containers to run within the same pod as MongoDB®, you can do so via the sidecars config parameter. Simply define your container according to the Kubernetes container spec.

sidecars:
  - name: your-image-name
    image: your-image
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    ports:
      - name: portname
       containerPort: 1234

Similarly, you can add extra init containers using the initContainers parameter.

initContainers:
  - name: your-image-name
    image: your-image
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    ports:
      - name: portname
        containerPort: 1234

Persistence

The Bitnami HashiCorp Consul image stores the HashiCorp Consul data at the /bitnami path of the container.

Persistent Volume Claims are used to keep the data across deployments. This is known to work in GCE, AWS, and minikube. See the Parameters section to configure the PVC or to disable persistence.

Adjust permissions of persistent volume mountpoint

As the image run as non-root by default, it is necessary to adjust the ownership of the persistent volume so that the container can write data into it.

By default, the chart is configured to use Kubernetes Security Context to automatically change the ownership of the volume. However this feature does not work in all Kubernetes distributions. As an alternative, this chart supports using an initContainer to change the ownership of the volume before mounting it in the final destination.

You can enable this initContainer by setting volumePermissions.enabled to true.

Troubleshooting

Find more information about how to deal with common errors related to Bitnami’s Helm charts in this troubleshooting guide.

Upgrading

To 9.0.0

On November 13, 2020, Helm v2 support was formally finished, this major version is the result of the required changes applied to the Helm Chart to be able to incorporate the different features added in Helm v3 and to be consistent with the Helm project itself regarding the Helm v2 EOL.

What changes were introduced in this major version?

• Previous versions of this Helm Chart use apiVersion: v1 (installable by both Helm 2 and 3), this Helm Chart was updated to apiVersion: v2 (installable by Helm 3 only). Here you can find more information about the apiVersion field.
• Move dependency information from the requirements.yaml to the Chart.yaml
• After running helm dependency update, a Chart.lock file is generated containing the same structure used in the previous requirements.lock
• The different fields present in the Chart.yaml file has been ordered alphabetically in a homogeneous way for all the Bitnami Helm Charts

Considerations when upgrading to this version

• If you want to upgrade to this version from a previous one installed with Helm v3, you shouldn’t face any issues
• If you want to upgrade to this version using Helm v2, this scenario is not supported as this version doesn’t support Helm v2 anymore
• If you installed the previous version with Helm v2 and wants to upgrade to this version with Helm v3, please refer to the official Helm documentation about migrating from Helm v2 to v3

Useful links

• https://docs.bitnami.com/tutorials/resolve-helm2-helm3-post-migration-issues/
• https://helm.sh/docs/topics/v2_v3_migration/
• https://helm.sh/blog/migrate-from-helm-v2-to-helm-v3/

To 8.0.0

• Several parameters were renamed or disappeared in favor of new ones on this major version:
  • securityContext.* is deprecated in favor of podSecurityContext and containerSecurityContext.
  • replicas is renamed to replicaCount.
  • updateStrategy.type is renamed to updateStrategy.
  • configmap is renamed to configuration.
• Chart labels were adapted to follow the Helm charts standard labels.
• This version also introduces bitnami/common, a library chart as a dependency. More documentation about this new utility could be found here. Please, make sure that you have updated the chart dependencies before executing any upgrade.

To 7.0.0

Consul pods are now deployed in parallel in order to bootstrap the cluster and be discovered.

The field podManagementPolicy can’t be updated in a StatefulSet, so you need to destroy it before you upgrade the chart to this version.

$ kubectl delete statefulset consul
$ helm upgrade <DEPLOYMENT_NAME> bitnami/consul

To 6.0.0

This release updates the Bitnami Consul container to 1.6.1-debian-9-r6, which is based on Bash instead of Node.js.

To 3.1.0

Consul container was moved to a non-root approach. There shouldn’t be any issue when upgrading since the corresponding securityContext is enabled by default. Both the container image and the chart can be upgraded by running the command below:

$ helm upgrade my-release bitnami/consul

If you use a previous container image (previous to 1.4.0-r16) disable the securityContext by running the command below:

$ helm upgrade my-release bitnami/consul --set securityContext.enabled=false,image.tag=XXX

To 2.0.0

Backwards compatibility is not guaranteed unless you modify the labels used on the chart’s deployments. Use the workaround below to upgrade from versions previous to 2.0.0. The following example assumes that the release name is consul:

$ kubectl delete statefulset consul --cascade=false