helmboot

Helmboot is a small command line tool for System Administrators install / upgrade either Jenkins and / or Jenkins X via GitOps and immutable infrastructure.

Helmboot is based on helm 3.x and helmfile under the covers.

Helmboot uses the Jenkins Operator to setup as many Jenkins servers are required in whatever namespaces via GitOps.

Using Jenkins and / or Jenkins X

You can choose whether to use purely Jenkins; purely Jenkins X or a combination of Jenkins and Jenkins X. You also have full flexibility in GitOps to decide which Apps are installed in which namespaces etc.

Creating a new installation

First create your kubernetes cluster. If you are using Google Cloud you can try using gcloud directly.

If not try the usual Jenkins X way.

Now run the helmboot create command:

helmboot create

If you want to manage Jenkins servers via GitOps and the Jenkins Operator then use:

helmboot create --jenkins

This will create a new git repository for your installation.

Once that is done you need to run the boot Job

Setting up Secrets

We don't yet have a nice helmboot CLI option to let you populate secrets.

Until then please follow the gcloud setup instructions

Running the boot Job

Once you have created your git repository via helmboot create or helmboot upgrade you can run the boot Job via:

helmboot run

This will use helm to install the boot Job and tail the log of the pod so you can see the boot job run

Upgrading a jx install or jx boot cluster on helm 2.x

You can use the helmboot upgrade command to help upgrade your existing Jenkins X cluster to helm 3 and helmfile.

Connect to the cluster you wish to migrate and run:

helmboot upgrade

and follow the instructions.

If your cluster is using GitOps the command will clone the development git repository to a temporary directory, modify it and submit a pull request.

If your cluster is not using GitOps then a new git repository will be created.

Upgrading your cluster

Once you have the git repository for the upgrade you need to run the boot Job in a clean empty cluster.

To simplify things you may want to create a new cluster, connect to that and then boot from there. If you are happy with the results you can scale down/destroy the old one