Install and enable Keptn

Keptn must be installed, enabled, and integrated into each cluster you want to monitor. This is because Keptn communicates with the Kubernetes scheduler for tasks such as enforcing checks natively, stopping a deployment from proceeding when criteria are not met, doing post-deployment evaluations and tracing all activities of all deployment workloads on the cluster.

Two methods are supported for installing Keptn:

• Releases v0.7.0 and later can be installed using the Helm Chart. This is the preferred strategy because it allows you to customize your cluster.

• See the use manifests section for more information on installing via manifest. This is the less-preferred way because it does not support customization.

After Keptn is installed, you must Enable Keptn for your cluster in order to run some Keptn functionality.

You are then ready to Integrate Keptn with your applications.

Use Helm Chart

Version v0.7.0 and later of Keptn should be installed using Helm Charts. The command sequence to fetch and install the latest release is:

helm repo add klt https://charts.lifecycle.keptn.sh
helm repo update
helm upgrade --install keptn klt/klt \
   -n keptn-lifecycle-toolkit-system --create-namespace --wait

Note that the helm repo update command is used for fresh installs as well as for upgrades.

Some helpful hints:

• Use the --version <version> flag on the helm upgrade --install command line to specify a different Keptn version.

• Use the following command sequence to see a list of available versions:

  helm repo update
  helm search repo klt
  

• To verify that the Keptn components are installed in your cluster, run the following command:

  kubectl get pods -n keptn-lifecycle-toolkit-system
  

  The output shows all components that are running on your system.

Modify Helm configuration options

Helm chart values can be modified before the installation. This is useful if you want to install only the metrics-operator rather than the full Toolkit or if you need to change the size of the installation.

To modify configuration options, download a copy of the helm/chart/values.yaml file, modify some values, and use the modified file to install Keptn:

1. Download the values.yaml file:

   helm get values RELEASE_NAME [flags] > values.yaml
   

2. Edit your local copy to modify some values

3. Install Keptn by adding the following string to your helm upgrade command line:

   --values=values.yaml
   

You can also use the --set flag to specify a value change for the helm upgrade --install command. Configuration options are specified using the format:

--set key1=value1,key2=value2,....

For more information,see

• The Helm Get Values) document

• The helm-charts page contains the full list of available values.

Use manifests

Versions v0.10.0 and earlier of Keptn can be installed using manifests, although we recommend that you use Helm Charts because they allow you to easily customize your configuration.

Versions 0.6.0 and earlier can only be installed using manifests.

Note When installing Version 0.6.0, you must first install the cert-manager with the following command sequence:

kubectl apply \
   -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.11.0/cert-manager.yaml
kubectl wait \
   --for=condition=Available deployment/cert-manager-webhook -n cert-manager --timeout=60s

Use a command sequence like the following to install Keptn from the manifest, specifying the version you want to install.

kubectl apply \
   -f https://github.com/keptn/lifecycle-toolkit/releases/download/v0.6.0/manifest.yaml
kubectl wait --for=condition=Available deployment/lifecycle-operator \
   -n keptn-lifecycle-toolkit-system --timeout=120s

Keptn and its dependencies are now installed and ready to use.

Enable Keptn for your cluster

To enable the Keptn in your cluster, annotate the Kubernetes Namespace resource for each namespace in the cluster. For an example of this, see simplenode-dev-ns.yaml file, which looks like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: simplenode-dev
  annotations:
    keptn.sh/lifecycle-toolkit: "enabled"

You see the annotation line keptn.sh/lifecycle-toolkit: "enabled". This annotation tells the webhook to handle the namespace.

After enabling Keptn for your namespace(s), you are ready to Integrate Keptn with your applications.