odk-central-helm

A Helm chart repository that contains Helm charts for deploying ODK Central

Deployment to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for deploying your applications to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

To ensure an efficient deployment process, we leverage Helm, a powerful package manager for Kubernetes, to orchestrate the deployment of our charts to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). There's a deploy.sh file in the deploy folder that does the magic.

Utilizing the helm upgrade Command

To deploy your applications to GKE, the helm upgrade command is used within the deploy.sh script. This command serves as the cornerstone of your deployment process and allows for seamless updates. Here is how the command is structured:

helm upgrade \
    --install \
    --debug \
    --create-namespace \
    --namespace "${NAMESPACE}" \
    --wait \
    --timeout 300s \
    -f ./charts/odk-central/values.yaml \
    $APP_NAME \
    ./charts/odk-central

Prerequisites

GKE cluster up and running in your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project.
Cloud SQL set up, including creating a database, user, and password.

Environment variables

In your CI environment (GitHub Actions), set the following environment variables to be used during the deployment process:

APP_NAME: Name of your application release
APP_REPLICA_COUNT: Number of replicas to create for a pod 
BACKEND_APP_DOMAIN: Domain for the ODK Backend deploy (e.g. example.com) 
BACKEND_PORT: Port that the backend application exposes in Kubernetes (usually 8383).
CLUSTER_NAME: Name of the GKE cluster youve created 
DB_HOST: Your database host (usually localhost due to Cloud SQL Proxy)
DB_INSTANCE_CONNECTION_NAME: Cloud SQL instance connection name
DB_NAME: Name of your database
DB_PASSWORD: Password for the database user
DB_SSL: Whether to use SSL for the database connection
DB_USER: Database user
ENKETO_API_KEY: API key for Enketo
ENKETO_DOMAIN: Domain for the Enketo application (e.g., enketo.something.com)
FRONTEND_APP_DOMAIN: Domain for the frontend application (the ODK Central UI)
FRONTEND_PORT: Port for the frontend application (usually 80)
GKE_ZONE: Zone where the GKE cluster is deployed (e.g., europe-west1-b)
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS: Google Cloud service account JSON key file.
GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT: Google Cloud project
NAMESPACE: Namespace that will be created for your applications
SYSADMIN_EMAIL: Email address for the system administrator

Create a user and password to log into ODK Central

After the service is deployed, exec into the backend service pod, and create a user (and promote if required)