omarmohsen / octop-app

Introduction

The main objective is to deploy/package a laravel based application as a helm chart, and create a pipeline for it, the application is a simple blog post creation webapp. The application consists of three main components:

• Laravel application (PHP running in a Apache 2.x container).
• MySQL Database used as a DB backend.
• Caching layer (Redis).

The helm chart is under the ./chart directory The Gitlab CI file is under ./gitlab-ci.yml The .env file is configured as a Kubernetes ConfigMap File

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes Cluster v1.2x
• Git
• Helm 3.x
• Gitlab CI
• PHP 8 with Laravel 8 and composer

Assumptions

Both a database/caching solution are introduced, we are using MySQL, and Redis, this needs to be considered in the Laravel .env file as environmental variables:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=<PWD>
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=octophpdb
DB_USERNAME=laravel
DB_PASSWORD=<PWD>
REDIS_HOST=<HOST>
REDIS_PASSWORD=<PWD>
REDIS_PORT=6379

Some of these parameters are considered common between the container parameters, hence they are included in the values.yaml e.g:

db:
	type: mysql
	user: laravel
	password: D4$vXsz2C
	name: octophpdb

Laravel .env file ConfigMap:

kind: ConfigMap
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: {{ include "octophp.fullname" . }}-env
data:
  laravelEnv: |
	DB_CONNECTION={{.Values.db.type}}
	DB_HOST={{ include "octophp.fullname" . }}-db
	DB_PORT={{.Values.db.service.port}}
	DB_DATABASE={{.Values.db.name}}
	DB_USERNAME={{.Values.db.user}}
	DB_PASSWORD={{.Values.db.password}}


---

In the MySQL StatefulSet configuration:

containers:
	env:
	- name: MYSQL_USER
	value: {{.Values.db.user}}
	- name: MYSQL_PASSWORD
	value: {{.Values.db.password}}
	- name: MYSQL_DATABASE
	value: {{.Values.db.name}}	

Installation

The repo needs to be cloned:

git clone https://github.com/omarmohsen/octop-app

The docker image needs to be built first:

docker build -t docker.io/omarmohsen/octop-app:0.1 .

If you need to push to another registry:

docker login <localregistry> #Login with credentials 

docker tag docker.io/omarmohsen:octop-app <localregistry>/<repo>/octop-app:0.1

docker push <localregistry>/<repo>/octop-app:0.1

The values.yaml needs to be updated with the correct parameters

helm install ./chart --release <release name> -n <namespace>

or deploy from another registry

helm install ./chart --release <release name> -n <namespace> --set image.repository <localregistry>/<repo>/octop-app:0.1 --set image.tag "0.1"

Test scenarios

There are two main test scenarios:

PHP Unit tests:

cd octop-app
./vendor/bin/phpunit

Helm test (starts a container and sends a request through wget (after helm installation):

helm test <release name>

Sample:

NAME: test
LAST DEPLOYED: Sat May 18 17:19:46 2024
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE:     test-octophp-test-connection
Last Started:   Sat May 18 22:13:42 2024
Last Completed: Sat May 18 22:13:46 2024
Phase:          Succeeded 

Troubleshooting

The pod for the PHP laravel application may CrashLoopBackOff since the MySQL pod may take time to startup:

kubectl get pod
NAME                                 READY   STATUS      RESTARTS      AGE
test-octophp-844d75bb67-zmps6        0/1     CrashLoopBackOff     9 (34m ago)   4h58m

After a while the pod will be running:

NAME                                 READY   STATUS      RESTARTS      AGE
test-octophp-844d75bb67-zmps6        1/1     Running     9 (34m ago)   4h58m

To check logs:

 kubectl logs test-octophp-844d75bb67-zmps6