Deploy and Manage Traefik with Portainer on a Charmed Kubernetes cluster

In this post you will learn a basic deployment of the Traefik ingress controller on a Charmed Kubernetes cluster and how to use it with Portainer. Please make sure to check our blog post here on how to use Portainer on a Charmed Kubernetes cluster as it is a pre-req for this tutorial.

Assumptions:

• You have a Charmed Kubernetes cluster deployed
• You have access to your cluster via kubectl
• You have helm installed
• You have a wildcard domain name setup on your DNS server. Another option is to add each host used on your cluster to your DNS server.

Initial prep-work

Let's start with some initial prep-work to prepare your cluster so you can do a basic deployment of Traefik.

1. Download the Traefik values.yaml file from their repository with the command :
   wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/traefik/traefik-helm-chart/master/traefik/values.yaml
2. Change the values.yaml file with sed so Traefik has access to ports 80 and 443:
   sed -i 's/\# hostPort: 8000/hostPort: 80/g' values.yaml sed -i 's/\# hostPort: 8443/hostPort: 443/g' values.yaml
3. Add the Trafik repo to helm:
   helm repo add traefik https://helm.traefik.io/traefik helm repo update
4. Remove the nginx-ingress-controller:
   kubectl delete namespace ingress-nginx-kubernetes-worker
5. Deploy traefik:
   helm install traefik traefik/traefik -f values.yaml
6. Access your Portainer instance via a ssh tunnel:
   juju ssh kubernetes-master/0 -L 30777:localhost:30777 -fN

Setup Portainer

1. Go to Cluster->Setup and add the traefik ingress controller:
   

Adding an App

1. Start by adding a Resource pool in order to deploy an app to be routed via traefik:
   
   
   
2. In this tutorial we are going to deploy Caddy:
   
   
   
3. Go to Applications->Add application and fill in the options for Caddy. Make sure to select the caddy resource pool that you created earlier:
   
4. After selecting the appropriate options, the last step is to publish your app. At the end of the App creation you need to select:
   1. Ingress - Publish this application via the HTTP route
   2. Click on publish a new port
   3. Add the container port, in this case 80
   4. Add the route, in this case / (root path)
      
5. After the app is deployed you can open the HTTP route configured in your resource pool to access Caddy:
   
6. You will see the default Caddy first page in your browser window: