ship

Ship

Ship enables the operation of third-party applications through modern software deployment pipelines (i.e. GitOps). Ship is a command line and UI that prepares workflows to enable deploying and updating of Helm charts, Kubernetes applications and other third-party software. Ship handles the process of merging custom settings (state.json) with custom overlays (using Kustomize), and preparing a deployable set of assets (an application). Ship is designed to provide first-time configuration UI and/or be used headless in a CI/CD pipeline to automate deployment of third party applications.

Ship includes first-class support for Helm charts, and automates the "last-mile" of custom configuration via Kustomize.

Features

• Web based "admin console" provides initial configuration of Helm values and creates Kustomize overlays
• Headless mode supports automated pipelines
• Merge Helm charts with override values and apply custom overlays with Kustomize to avoid merge conflicts when upstream or local values are changed
• Deploy Helm charts to a Kubernetes cluster without Tiller
• Enables GitOps workflows to update third party applications
• Configuration workflow ship.yml files can be included in Helm chart repos, to customize the initial ship init experience

Operating modes

ship init

Prepares a new application for deployment. Use for:

• Generating initial config (state.json) for an application
• Creating and managing Kustomize overlays to be applied before deployment

ship update

Updates an existing application by merging the latest release with the local state and overlays. Use for:

• Preparing an update to be deployed to a third party application
• Automating the update process to start from a continuous integration (CI) service

ship watch

Polls an upstream source, blocking until any change has been published. Use for:

• Triggering creation of pull requests in a CI pipeline, so that third party updates can be manually reviewed, and then automatically deployed once merged

Installation

There are two ways you can get started with Ship:

Installing locally

Ship is packaged as a single binary, and Linux and MacOS versions are distributed:

• To download the latest Linux build, run:

curl -sSL https://github.com/replicatedhq/ship/releases/download/v0.14.0/ship_0.14.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz | tar xv && sudo mv ship /usr/local/bin

• To download the latest MacOS build, run:

curl -sSL https://github.com/replicatedhq/ship/releases/download/v0.14.0/ship_0.14.0_darwin_amd64.tar.gz | tar xv && sudo mv ship /usr/local/bin

After ship is installed, run it with:

ship init <path-to-chart> # github.com/kubernetes/charts/mysql

Running in Docker

To run ship in Docker:

docker run replicated/ship init <path-to-chart> # github.com/kubernetes/charts/mysql

Note, you will need to mount and configure a shared volume, in order to persist any changes made within the Ship admin console when launched via Docker.

Ship Modes

CI/CD Integration

Once you've prepared an application using ship init, the deployable application assets can be generated, using any version of the application, by running:

ship update

The watch command is designed to be a trigger for a CI/CD process by watching the upstream application for changes. Running ship watch will load the state file and periodically poll the upstream application and exit when it finds a change. A simple, starting workflow could be to run ship watch && ship update after completing ship init. This will apply an update to the base directory.

Community

For questions about using Ship, there's a Replicated Community forum.

For bug reports, please open an issue in this repo.

For instructions on building the project and making contributions, see Contributing