Installation Guide

Overview

This document serves four purposes:

1. Ensure you have the prerequisites for building the images in Crunchy Container Suite
2. Make sure your local machine has all the pieces needed to run the examples in the GitHub repository
3. Run the images as standalone containers in Docker
4. Instruct you how to install the Crunchy Container Suite into Kubernetes or OpenShift

Where applicable, we will try to denote which installations and steps are required for the items above.

When we set up the directories below, you will notice they seem to be quite deeply nested. We are setting up a Go programming language workspace. Go has a specific folder structure for it’s workspaces with multiple projects in a workspace. If you are not going build the container images you can ignore the deep directories below, but it will not hurt you if you follow the directions exactly.

Requirements

These instructions are developed and on for the following operating systems:

• CentOS 7

• RHEL 7

We also assume you are using the Docker provided with the distributions above. If you have installed Docker CE or EE on your machine, please create a VM for this work or uninstall Docker CE or EE.

The images in Crunchy Container Suite can run on different environments including:

• Docker 1.13+

• OpenShift Container Platform 3.11

• Kubernetes 1.8+

Initial Installs

CentOS 7 only

$ sudo yum -y install epel-release
$ sudo yum -y install golang git

RHEL 7 only

$ sudo subscription-manager repos --enable="rhel-7-server-extras-rpms" --enable="rhel-7-server-optional-rpms"
$ sudo yum -y install epel-release
$ sudo yum -y install golang git

Clone GitHub repository

Make directories to hold the GitHub clone that also work with the Go workspace structure

$ mkdir -p $HOME/cdev/src/github.com/crunchydata $HOME/cdev/pkg $HOME/cdev/bin
$ cd $HOME/cdev/src/github.com/crunchydata
$ git clone https://github.com/crunchydata/crunchy-containers
$ cd crunchy-containers
$ git checkout v4.6.11

Your Shell Environment

We have found, that because of the way Go handles different projects, you may want to create a separate account if are plan to build the containers and work on other Go projects. You could also look into some of the GOPATH wrappers.

If your goal is to simply run the containers, any properly configured user account should work.

Now we need to set the project paths and software version numbers. Edit your $HOME/.bashrc file with your favorite editor and add the following information. You can leave out the comments at the end of each line starting with #:

export GOPATH=$HOME/cdev        # set path to your new Go workspace
export GOBIN=$GOPATH/bin        # set bin path
export PATH=$PATH:$GOBIN        # add Go bin path to your overall path
export CCP_BASEOS=ubi8       # centos7 for CentOS, ubi8 for Red Hat Universal Base Image
export CCP_PGVERSION=13         # The PostgreSQL major version
export CCP_PG_FULLVERSION=13.11
export CCP_POSTGIS_VERSION=3.0  # The PostGIS version
export CCP_VERSION=4.6.11
export CCP_IMAGE_PREFIX=crunchydata # Prefix to put before all the container image names
export CCP_IMAGE_TAG=$CCP_BASEOS-$CCP_PG_FULLVERSION-$CCP_VERSION   # Used to tag the images
export CCP_POSTGIS_IMAGE_TAG=$CCP_BASEOS-$CCP_PG_FULLVERSION-$CCP_POSTGIS_VERSION-$CCP_VERSION # Used to tag images that include PostGIS
export CCPROOT=$GOPATH/src/github.com/crunchydata/crunchy-containers    # The base of the clone github repo
export CCP_SECURITY_CONTEXT=""
export CCP_CLI=kubectl          # kubectl for K8s, oc for OpenShift
export CCP_NAMESPACE=demo       # Change this to whatever namespace/openshift project name you want to use

It will be necessary to refresh your .bashrc file in order for the changes to take effect.

. ~/.bashrc

At this point we have almost all the prequesites required to build the Crunchy Container Suite.

Building UBI Containers With Supported Crunchy Enterprise Software

Before you can build supported containers on UBI and Crunchy Supported Software, you need to add the Crunchy repositories to your approved Yum repositories. Crunchy Enterprise Customer running on UBI can login and download the Crunchy repository key and yum repository from https://access.crunchydata.com/ on the downloads page. Once the files are downloaded please place them into the $CCPROOT/conf directory (defined above in the environment variable section).

Install Docker

Install Docker

sudo yum -y install docker

It is necessary to add the docker group and give your user access to that group:

sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -a -G docker <username>

Logout and login again as the same user to allow group settings to take effect.

Enable Docker service and start Docker (once all configuration is complete):

sudo systemctl enable docker.service
sudo systemctl start docker.service

Install PostgreSQL

There are a variety of ways you can download PostgreSQL.

For specific installation instructions for installing PostgreSQL 12 on CentOS, please visit the Crunchy Data Developer Portal:

https://www.crunchydata.com/developers/download-postgres/binaries/postgresql12

Configuring Storage for Kubernetes Based Systems

In addition to the environment variables we set earlier, you will need to add environment variables for Kubernetes storage configuration. Please see the Storage Configuration document for configuring storage using environment variables set in .bashrc.

Don’t forget to:

source ~/.bashrc

OpenShift Installation

Use the OpenShift installation guide to install OpenShift Enterprise on your host. Make sure to choose the proper version of OpenShift you want to install. The main instructions for 3.11 are here and you’ll be able to select a different version there, if needed:

https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/3.11/install/index.html

Kubernetes Installation

$ hostname --ip-address

Installing Kubernetes

We suggest using Kubeadm as a simple way to install Kubernetes.

See Kubeadm for installing the latest version of Kubeadm.

See Create a Cluster for creating the Kubernetes cluster using Kubeadm. Note: We find that Weave networking works particularly well with the container suite.

Please see here to view the official documentation regarding configuring DNS for your Kubernetes cluster.

Post Kubernetes Configuration

In order to run the various examples, Role Based Account Control will need to be set up. Specifically, the cluster-admin role will need to be assigned to the Kubernetes user that will be utilized to run the examples. This is done by creating the proper ClusterRoleBinding:

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding \
--clusterrole cluster-admin --user someuser

If you are running on GKE, the following command can be utilized to auto-populate the user option with the account that is currently logged into Google Cloud:

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding \
--clusterrole cluster-admin --user $(gcloud config get-value account)

If more than one user will be running the examples on the same Kubernetes cluster, a unique name will need to be provided for each new ClusterRoleBinding created in order to assign the cluster-admin role to every user. The example below will create a ClusterRoleBinding with a unique value:

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding <unique>-cluster-admin-binding \
    --clusterrole cluster-admin \
    --user someuser

If you are running on GKE, the following can be utilized to create a unique ClusterRoleBinding for each user, with the user’s Google Cloud account prepended to the name of each new ClusterRoleBinding:

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding "$(gcloud config get-value account)-cluster-admin-binding" \
    --clusterrole cluster-admin \
    --user $(gcloud config get-value account)

Helm

Some Kubernetes Helm examples are provided in the following directory as one option for deploying the Container Suite.

$CCPROOT/examples/helm/

Once you have your Kubernetes environment configured, it is simple to get Helm up and running. Please refer to this document to get Helm installed and configured properly.

Configuring Namespace and Permissions

In Kubernetes, a concept called a namespace provides the means to separate created resources or components into individual logically grouped partitions. In OpenShift, namespace is referred to as a project.

It is considered a best practice to have dedicated namespaces for projects in both testing and production environments.

Kubernetes

This section will illustrate how to set up a new Kubernetes namespace called demo, and will then show how to provide permissions to that namespace to allow the Kubernetes examples to run within that namespace.

First, view currently existing namespaces:

$ kubectl get namespace
NAME          STATUS    AGE
default       Active    21d
kube-public   Active    21d
kube-system   Active    21d

Then, create a new namespace called demo:

$ kubectl create -f $CCPROOT/conf/demo-namespace.json
namespace "demo" created
$ kubectl get namespace demo
NAME      STATUS    AGE
demo      Active    7s

Then set the namespace as the default for the current context:

$ kubectl config set-context $(kubectl config current-context) --namespace=demo

We can verify that the namespace was set correctly through the following command:

$ kubectl config view | grep namespace:
    namespace: demo

OpenShift

This section assumes an administrator has already logged in first as the system:admin user as directed by the OpenShift Installation Guide.

For our development purposes only, we typically specify the OCP Authorization policy of AllowAll as documented here:

https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/3.11/install_config/configuring_authentication.html#AllowAllPasswordIdentityProvider

We do not recommend this authentication policy for a production deployment of OCP.

Log into the system as a user:

$ oc login -u <user>

The next step is to create a demo namespace to run the examples within. The name of this OCP project will be what you supply in the CCP_NAMESPACE environment variable:

$ oc new-project demo --description="Crunchy Containers project" --display-name="Crunchy-Containers"
Now using project "demo" on server "https://127.0.0.1:8443".

$ export CCP_NAMESPACE=demo

If we view the list of projects, we can see the new project has been added and is “active”.

$ oc get projects
NAME        DISPLAY NAME         STATUS
demo        Crunchy-Containers   Active
myproject   My Project           Active

If you were on a different project and wanted to switch to the demo project, you would do so by running the following:

$ oc project demo
Now using project "demo" on server "https://127.0.0.1:8443".

When self-provisioning a new project using the oc new-project command, the current user (i.e., the user you used when logging into OCP with the oc login command) will automatically be assigned to the admin role for that project. This will allow the user to create the majority of the objects needed to successfully run the examples. However, in order to create the Persistent Volume objects needed to properly configure storage for the examples, an additional role is needed. Specifically, a new role is needed that can both create and delete Persistent Volumes.

Using the following two commands, create a new Cluster Role that has the ability to create and delete persistent volumes, and then assign that role to your current user:

$ oc create clusterrole crunchytester --verb="list,create,delete" --resource=persistentvolumes
clusterrole "crunchytester" created

$ oc adm policy add-cluster-role-to-user crunchytester someuser
cluster role "crunchytester" added: "someuser"

Your user should now have the roles and privileges required to run the examples.