drydock: a flexible manifest builder for Open edX

⚠️ Warning: drydock is currently in an alpha stage and may suffer substantial changes while it transitions in to a stable stage.

Installation

tvm plugins install -e git+https://github.com/edunext/drydock#egg=drydock
tutor plugins enable drydock

Getting started

Drydock aims to offer flexibility on the kind of environment you want to generate, for that reason you can chose different kind of implementations (of renderers?) depending on your needs. At the moment Drydock ships with a basic manifest builder that wraps the Kubernetes generated files by tutor in a Kustomize application with some useful extra resources.

To use drydock just use the reference that defines the implementation you want drydock to use and run:

tutor drydock save -r reference.yml

An example reference would look something like this:

drydock:
  builder_class:  drydock.manifest_builder.application.manifest_builder.ManifestBuilder
  config_class: drydock.manifest_builder.infrastructure.tutor_config.TutorConfig
  manifest_class: drydock.manifest_builder.infrastructure.tutor_based_manifests.BaseManifests
  manifest_options:
    output: "drydock-environment"

This will render the default drydock environment on the drydock-environment directory, allowing you to check the files onto version control and use tools for continuous deployment such as Flux or ArgoCD. The default environment is generated using Tutor and its templates, as a result it should be compatible with all the plugins, variables and patches.

Note: If you are using module or yaml plugins in tutor and set manifest_options.output=env you will have to define your TUTOR_PLUGINS_ROOT outside of your TUTOR_ROOT because drydock will override your tutor env and erase your plugins.

Extended builder

Drydock also ships with an extended builder that adds the ability to use arbitrary templates as an extra overlay for the Kustomize app used by the base builder. To use it one must run drydock with the following reference:

---
drydock:
  builder_class:  drydock.manifest_builder.application.manifest_builder.ManifestBuilder
  config_class: drydock.manifest_builder.infrastructure.tutor_config.TutorExtendedConfig
  manifest_class: drydock.manifest_builder.infrastructure.tutor_based_manifests.ExtendedManifest
  manifest_options:
    output: "env"
    extra_templates: extra_templates_root

Where extra_templates_root points to the directory that holds your extra templates. In extra_templates_root you must include an directory named extra-extensions. Inside extra-extensions you can write any template that you want but is meant to be used as a Kustomize overlay, therefore you will need at least a Kustomization.yml file.

One use case is to use the extended builder to add helm chart definitions:

# extra_templates_root/extra-extensions/kustomization.yml
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization

helmCharts:
  - name: ingress-nginx
    repo: https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
    namespace: ingress-nginx
    version: 4.0.18
    releaseName: ingress-nginxx

Rationale

This project is proposed as a possible way of creating a community maintained reference for large openedx installation. Sometimes the needs for customization in large instances of openedx goes against the required simplicity in the configuration that the tutor project strives for. In those cases, the solution is to create a tutor plugin that allows for such advanced customization options.

This projects intends to fill that gap with a solution that should allow many community members to collaborate in one repo on the heavy toll that is the maintainance of openedx operations.

License

This software is licensed under the terms of the AGPLv3.