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Spar (Iceland Spar - Sunstone)
Overview
spar is a guided CLI an dpipeline plugin to generate kubernetes manifests utilizing kustomize.
spar has two modes:
- Automated - as a pipeline plugin, spar uses the environment and surrounding resources to populate the manifests directory when one is not present.
- Guided CLI - the guided CLI provides a set of questions that dynamically generates the manifests directory populated with the corresponding kubernetes resources in YAML.
Kubernetes' 1.14 release, introduced kustomize into kubectl as the choice for kubernetes object management. spar aims to ease the migration path to the use of kustomize by supplying what we consider to be the minimum viable YAML to get started.
Automated
We see users coming to spar from 3 upgrade paths:
| Start | Upgrade Path | Result |
|---|---|---|
| No manifests | create manifests and kustomization.yml | manifests + kustomization file |
| Manifests without kustomize | create kustomization.yml based on manifests | manifests + kustomization file |
| Full implementation of kustomize | verify and suggest improvements | suggestions for kustomize improvements |
Automated - similarly, when spar is run in an automated mode, a deployment, service, and kustomization file are created however spar takes care to look at the application's filesystem and attempt to intelligently populate the YAML such that it can be deployed by Argo and kubernetes_deploy
| Variables | Example Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| ARGO_APP_NAME | hello-app |
Application name seperated with hyphen |
| ARGO_APP_PORT | 8080 |
Application Running Port |
| ARGO_APP_REGISTRY | registry.gitlab.com/itentialopensource/spar |
Location of application image |
Guided CLI
In the current release the Guided CLI only handles the "First Time Create" path, and therefore will dutifully exit if a manifests directory exists.
an available cluster and authentication are assumed by the above
spar partners best in a development pipeline with argo
Installation
spar is packaged as an npm module and is available on the public npm registry at:
npm install -g @itentialopensource/sparUsage
Automated
Integrated with argo and enabled when kubernetes_deploy is used.
Guided CLI
spar createLicense & Maintainers
Maintained by
Itential Cloud Team
License
Icelandic Sunstone/Spar
[An integrated] command line tool to build Kubernetes manifests
It has been speculated that the sunstone (Old Norse: sólarsteinn, a different mineral from the gem-quality sunstone) mentioned in medieval Icelandic texts was Iceland spar, and that Vikings used its light-polarizing property to tell the direction of the sun on cloudy days for navigational purposes.