Installing PGO Using Helm

This section provides instructions for installing and configuring PGO using Helm.

There are two sources for the PGO Helm chart:

• the Postgres Operator examples repo;
• the Helm chart hosted on the Crunchy container registry, which supports direct Helm installs.

The Postgres Operator Examples repo

Prerequisites

First, go to GitHub and fork the Postgres Operator examples repository, which contains the PGO Helm installer.

https://github.com/CrunchyData/postgres-operator-examples/fork

Once you have forked this repo, you can download it to your working environment with a command similar to this:

YOUR_GITHUB_UN="$YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME"
git clone --depth 1 "git@github.com:${YOUR_GITHUB_UN}/postgres-operator-examples.git"
cd postgres-operator-examples
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For Powershell environments:

$env:YOUR_GITHUB_UN="YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME"
git clone --depth 1 "git@github.com:$env:YOUR_GITHUB_UN/postgres-operator-examples.git"
cd postgres-operator-examples
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The PGO Helm chart is located in the helm/install directory of this repository.

Configuration

The values.yaml file for the Helm chart contains all of the available configuration settings for PGO. The default values.yaml settings should work in most Kubernetes environments, but it may require some customization depending on your specific environment and needs.

For instance, it might be necessary to customize the image tags that are utilized using the controllerImages setting:

controllerImages:
  cluster: registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/postgres-operator:ubi8-5.3.9-0
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Please note that the values.yaml file is located in helm/install.

Logging

By default, PGO deploys with debug logging turned on. If you wish to disable this, you need to set the debug attribute in the values.yaml to false, e.g.:

debug: false
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Installation Mode

When PGO is installed, it can be configured to manage PostgreSQL clusters in all namespaces within the Kubernetes cluster, or just those within a single namespace. When managing PostgreSQL clusters in all namespaces, a ClusterRole and ClusterRoleBinding is created to ensure PGO has the permissions it requires to properly manage PostgreSQL clusters across all namespaces. However, when PGO is configured to manage PostgreSQL clusters within a single namespace only, a Role and RoleBinding is created instead.

In order to select between these two modes when installing PGO using Helm, the singleNamespace setting in the values.yaml file can be utilized:

singleNamespace: false
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Specifically, if this setting is set to false (which is the default), then a ClusterRole and ClusterRoleBinding will be created, and PGO will manage PostgreSQL clusters in all namespaces. However, if this setting is set to true, then a Role and RoleBinding will be created instead, allowing PGO to only manage PostgreSQL clusters in the same namespace utilized when installing the PGO Helm chart.

Install

Once you have configured the Helm chart according to your specific needs, it can then be installed using helm:

helm install $NAME -n $NAMESPACE helm/install
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Automated Upgrade Checks

By default, PGO will automatically check for updates to itself and software components by making a request to a URL. If PGO detects there are updates available, it will print them in the logs. As part of the check, PGO will send aggregated, anonymized information about the current deployment to the endpoint. An upcoming release will allow for PGO to opt-in to receive and apply updates to software components automatically.

PGO will check for updates upon startup and once every 24 hours. Any errors in checking will have no impact on PGO's operation. To disable the upgrade check, you can set the disable_check_for_upgrades value in the Helm chart to true.

For more information about collected data, see the Crunchy Data collection notice.

Uninstall

To uninstall PGO, remove all your PostgresCluster objects, then use the helm uninstall command:

helm uninstall $NAME -n $NAMESPACE
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Helm [leaves the CRDs][helm-crd-limits] in place. You can remove them with kubectl delete:

kubectl delete -f helm/install/crds
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The Crunchy Container Registry

Installing directly from the registry

Crunchy Data hosts an OCI registry that helm can use directly. (Not all helm commands support OCI registries. For more information on which commands can be used, see the Helm documentation.)

You can install PGO directly from the registry using the helm install command:

helm install pgo oci://registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/pgo
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Or to see what values are set in the default values.yaml before installing, you could run a helm show command just as you would with any other registry:

helm show values oci://registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/pgo
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Downloading from the registry

Rather than deploying directly from the Crunchy registry, you can instead use the registry as the source for the Helm chart.

To do so, download the Helm chart from the Crunchy Container Registry:

# To pull down the most recent Helm chart
helm pull oci://registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/pgo

# To pull down a specific Helm chart
helm pull oci://registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/pgo --version 5.3.9
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Once the Helm chart has been downloaded, uncompress the bundle

tar -xvf pgo-5.3.9.tgz
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And from there, you can follow the instructions above on setting the Configuration and installing a local Helm chart.