GitOps with Flux v2¶

Gitops is a way to do Kubernetes application delivery. It works by using Git as a single source of truth for Kubernetes resources and everything else. With Git at the center of your delivery pipelines, you and your team can make pull requests to accelerate and simplify application deployments and operations tasks to Kubernetes.

Installing Flux v2 (GitOps Toolkit)¶

Starting with version 0.53.0, eksctl provides the option to bootstrap Flux v2 components into an EKS cluster, with the enable flux subcommand.

eksctl enable flux --config-file <config-file>

The enable flux command will shell out to the flux binary and run the flux bootstrap command against the cluster.

In order to allow users to specify whichever bootstrap flags they like, the eksctl API exposes an arbitrary map[string]string of flags. To find out which flags you need to bootstrap your cluster, simply run flux bootstrap --help.

Example:

---
apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig

metadata:
  name: cluster-12
  region: eu-north-1

# other cluster config ...

gitops:
  flux:
    gitProvider: github      # required. options are github, gitlab or git
    flags:                   # required. arbitrary map[string]string for all flux args.
      owner: "dr-who"
      repository: "our-org-gitops-repo"
      private: "true"
      branch: "main"
      namespace: "flux-system"
      path: "clusters/cluster-12"
      team: "team1,team2"

This example configuration can be found here.

Note

Flux v2 configuration can only be provided via configuration file; no flags are exposed on this subcommand other than --config-file.

Flux will install default toolkit components to the cluster, unless told otherwise by your configuration:

kubectl get pods --namespace flux-system
NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
helm-controller-7cfb98d895-zmmfc           1/1     Running   0          3m30s
kustomize-controller-557986cf44-2jwjh      1/1     Running   0          3m35s
notification-controller-65694dc94d-rhbxk   1/1     Running   0          3m20s
source-controller-7f856877cf-jgwdk         1/1     Running   0          3m39s

For instructions on how to use your newly installed Gitops Toolkit, refer to the official docs.

Bootstrap after cluster create¶

You can have your cluster bootstrapped immediately following a cluster create by including your Flux configuration in your config file and running:

eksctl create cluster --config-file <config-file>

Requirements¶

Environment variables¶

Before running eksctl enable flux, ensure that you have read the Flux getting started docs. If you are using Github or Gitlab as your git provider, either GITHUB_TOKEN or GITLAB_TOKEN must be exported with your Personal Access Token in your session. Please refer to the Flux docs for any other requirements.

Flux version¶

Eksctl requires a minimum Flux version of 0.32.0.

Quickstart profiles¶

Quickstart profiles will not be supported with Flux v2.