Django Helm Chart

A generic Django (plus Celery) Helm chart.

Preparing your Django app

This chart supports a web plus optional celery and beat deployments. Be prepared to extend it as necessary.

Django settings will be managed by environment variables. django-environ works well for this and can parse the DATABASE_URL connection string. This chart expects SECRET_KEY and DATABASE_URL variables.

Kubernetes works best when it is able to determine application health. You Django app should have a /_health/ view such as

def health(request):
    return HttpResponse("ok", content_type="text/plain")

urlpatterns = [
    path("_health/", health),
...

Set the value web.livenessProbe.path and web.readinessProbe.path to change the URL.

Run commands

This helm chart will set a "role" environment variable to web, worker, or beat. It's up to your Docker image to read this variable and run the correct command.

Usage

1. Add our Helm chart repo helm repo add django https://burke-software.gitlab.io/django-helm-chart/
2. Review our values.yaml. At a minimum you'll need to set env.secret.SECRET_KEY and env.secret.DATABASE_URL.
3. Install the chart helm install your-app django/django -f your-values.yml

Tips

• Do you really need kubernetes? It's very complex.
• Don't use helm without helm diff. One typo will wipe your app without warning otherwise.
• While supported, I don't suggest running stateful services like PostgreSQL in kubernetes. Upgrades will likely involve downtime or extensive and arcane knowledge.
• It's fine to use this chart as a reference for your own chart instead of directly using it.

Managing environment variables and secrets

I suggest either

• Keep them in a values.yml file in a private repo
• Make use of --reuse-values and --set
• Keep them in a non helm chart managed service

Deploying in CI

I use lwolf/helm-kubectl-docker with Gitlab CI. Example.

Support development

Maintaining this chart takes time. Considering supporting it by

• Donating on liberapay
• Check out GlitchTip error tracking, which is where this project started

Commercial support is available - email info@burkesoftware.com

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Report bugs on GitLab issues. Please only open feature requests that you'd like to implement yourself or pay for.