Consul Quik Start on MiniKube using Helm Charts

Posted on January 22, 2023 in infra

Quik instrcution guide to install Consul with MiniKube , Helm Charts and docker on Linux

Pre-requisites

Make sure you have

2 CPUs or more 4GB of free memory 30GB of free disk space

Install MiniKube

minikube is local Kubernetes, focusing on making it easy to learn and develop for kubernetes.

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

minikube start

Please refer here more info

Install docker

Why? MiniKube-Kubernetes gets installed / created as a virtual environment using docker.

If you are intersted you can use any of the Container or virtual machine manager, such as: Docker, QEMU, Hyperkit, Hyper-V, KVM, Parallels, Podman, VirtualBox, or VMware Fusion/Workstation

Install Helm Charts

Why? The best package manager for Kubernetes

If you think you can manage , you can try with Terraform Kubernetes aswell , however Helm provides best of support to mange Kubernetes cluser

curl https://baltocdn.com/helm/signing.asc | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/helm.gpg > /dev/null
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https --yes
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/helm.gpg] https://baltocdn.com/helm/stable/debian/ all main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/helm-stable-debian.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install helm

Install the Consul

   minikube start --driver=docker ## To start the MiniKube Kubernetese Dev Cluser on local machine
   helm install -f consul-values.yaml consul hashicorp/consul --create-namespace -n consul --version 1.0.2 # Create a counsul namespace

   Download the sample consult from Hashicorp
   git clone https://github.com/hashicorp-education/learn-consul-service-mesh-deploy.git
   cd learn-consul-service-mesh-deploy

   Install Consul Helm Charts 
   helm install -f consul-values.yaml consul hashicorp/consul --create-namespace -n consul --version 1.0.2

   Validate the installation 
   kubectl get pods --namespace consul --selector app=consul

   Expose Consult UI port
   kubectl port-forward pods/consul-server-0 8500:8500 --namespace consul

   Now we can access Consult UI at localhost:8500/ui


   Deploy Sample app from Hashicorp
   kubectl apply -f hashicups/

   Check the services

   kubectl get pods --selector consul.hashicorp.com/connect-inject-status=injected

   Expose the app
   kubectl port-forward service/nginx 18080:80 --address 0.0.0.0

   The HashiCups UI will be available at http://localhost:18080 in your browse


   ### Kill everything

   minikube delete --all

Once you install the Pre-requisites , please follow the below steps mentioned here for deploying a sample Consult on to the new cluser and then deploying a sample application whith Service Mesh