Implementing releases for the harmony Helm Chart

[jfavellar90]

This PR aims to implement the chart-releaser action to handle the releases of the harmony chart, hosting it in GitHub Pages. This PR implies the following changes in this repo:

• The harmony chart was moved to a folder called charts, which complies with the chart-releaser standard.
• The gh-pages branch was pushed to the repo. This branch will host the README of the repo and an index.yaml file containing harmony chart helpful metadata to install the chart with helm. This index.yaml file is auto-generated by the chart-releaser action, so it will exist once the first release is run.
• Repo configuration was changed to build GitHub pages from the gh-pages branch, as indicated in the chart-releaser prerequisites. The page is already available at https://openedx.github.io/openedx-k8s-harmony/
• A GitHub Action was added to run the chart release routine. This action will be run only if changes in the charts are detected.

If this is merged, operators would be able to add the helm repo and install the chart like this:

helm repo add openedx-harmony https://openedx.github.io/openedx-k8s-harmony
helm repo update
helm install [RELEASE_NAME] openedx-harmony/harmony-chart

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[felipemontoya]

@jfavellar90 something is off with this PR. The certmanager, elasticseach, ingress and so on charts that were in .tgz form would be deleted.
I'm all for having then in a format that is not binary but I don't think that deleting them should be a side effect.

[felipemontoya]

Now I went to look at the gh-pages branch and I see that those charts are dependencies now.

Do we now for certain that the tar files that were in the repo were not modified and should be exact copies of what is in the dependencies repos? I mean, it should be like that, but I'd like to be sure that we are not requiring some custom change in them.

[jfavellar90]

@bradenmacdonald @felipemontoya I created a new PR and removed the one I created from Edunext's Harmony fork to prevent permissions problems when creating a new release in the repo.
I tested the release process by running the action on PR modification. The GH action created a new release you can check in the releases page. It contains the Helm artifact used to install the chart. Additionally, the GH page was released at https://openedx.github.io/openedx-k8s-harmony/ and now it's possible to install the chart via Helm using the commands indicated in the PR description.

What's missing:

• Revert the change that triggers the action on PR update
• Remove testing release and latest gh-pages branch commit
• Add the docs on how to install the chart via Helm

[jfavellar90]

Now I went to look at the gh-pages branch and I see that those charts are dependencies now.

Do we now for certain that the tar files that were in the repo were not modified and should be exact copies of what is in the dependencies repos? I mean, it should be like that, but I'd like to be sure that we are not requiring some custom change in them.

This is not a concern, we didn't have custom changes on those files, thanks to the releaser action we don't have to worry anymore about those dependencies artifacts

[bradenmacdonald]

Nice work @jfavellar90 !

I noticed one issue which is that the example helm install command should specify a namespace like --namespace harmony and in NOTES.txt we need to change the namespace in the example command to use {{ .Release.Namespace }}

kubectl get svc -n harmony harmony-ingress-nginx-controller

should be

kubectl get svc -n {{ .Release.Namespace }} harmony-ingress-nginx-controller

Here are the full logs from my test. You can see there was an error because I installed it into the default namespace, but the printed instructions for checking the load balancer assume the harmony namespace.

infra-example % helm repo add openedx-harmony https://openedx.github.io/openedx-k8s-harmony
"openedx-harmony" has been added to your repositories

infra-example % helm repo update
Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
...Successfully got an update from the "openedx-harmony" chart repository
...Successfully got an update from the "kubernetes-dashboard" chart repository
Update Complete. ⎈Happy Helming!⎈

infra-example % kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.10.1/cert-manager.crds.yaml --namespace=harmony
...

infra-example % helm install harmony openedx-harmony/harmony-chart
NAME: harmony
LAST DEPLOYED: Tue Jun 13 15:20:03 2023
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None
NOTES:
Your harmony cluster is now ready to use!

An NGINX load balancer routes all HTTP/HTTPS traffic into the cluster to each
Open edX instance. Even before you deploy any Open edX instances, you can test
that the load balancer is working. First, get its external IP using

    kubectl get svc -n harmony harmony-ingress-nginx-controller

Next, go to http://the.external.ip.shown/cluster-echo-test and make sure you get
a JSON response.

infra-example % kubectl get svc -n harmony harmony-ingress-nginx-controller
Error from server (NotFound): namespaces "harmony" not found

infra-example % kubectl get svc -n default harmony-ingress-nginx-controller
NAME                               TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP       PORT(S)                      AGE
harmony-ingress-nginx-controller   LoadBalancer   10.245.118.79   146.190.188.238   80:32179/TCP,443:30328/TCP   3m30s

[bradenmacdonald]

Oh yeah, don't forget values.yaml - so the full example install command should probably be something like:

helm install harmony --namespace harmony --values values.yaml openedx-harmony/harmony-chart

[jfavellar90]

@bradenmacdonald I addressed your comments. I added the corresponding docs and recreated the Helm chart release to include the change in the NOTES.txt file. Feel free to test again following the new instructions. To prevent errors, I suggest:

• Remove the current chart installation from your testing cluster.
• Remove the helm repo (helm repo remove openedx-harmony). Then, follow the instructions to install the chart mentioned above.

[jfavellar90]

@bradenmacdonald please let me know if we are Ok to merge this PR since I need to revert some changes before hitting the merge button

[bradenmacdonald]

@jfavellar90 I tested it again with a fresh cluster on DigitalOcean and it worked perfectly. Please go ahead and revert those changes and merge :)

👍🏻

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