badhouseplants-net-old/content/posts/argocd-dynamic-environment-per-branch-part-1/index.md

---
title: "Argocd Dynamic Environment Per Branch:  Part 1"
date: 2023-02-25T14:00:00+01:00
draft: true
ShowToc: true
cover:
    image: "cover.png"
    caption: "Argocd Dynamic Environment Per Branch Part 1"
    relative: false
    responsiveImages: false
---

[Do you remember?]({{< ref "dont-use-argocd-for-infrastructure" >}})
> And using `helmfile`, I will install `ArgoCD` to my clusters, of course, because it's an awesome tool, without any doubts. But don't manage your infrastructure with it, because it's a part of your infrastructure, and it's a service that you provide to other teams. And I'll talk about in one of the next posts.

Yes, I have written 4 posts where I was almost absuletely negative about `ArgoCD`. But I was talking about infrastructure then. I've got some ideas about how to describe it in a better way, but I think I will write another post about it.

Here, I want to talk about dynamic *(preview)* environments, and I'm going to describe how to create them using my blog as an example. My blog is a pretty easy application. From `Kubernetes` perspective, it's just a container with some static content. And here, you already can notice that static is an opposite of dynamic, so it's the first problem that I'll have to tackle. Turning static content into dynamic. So my blog consists of `markdown` files that are used by `hugo` for a web page generation. 

>Initially I was using `hugo` server to serve the static, but it needs way more resources than `nginx`, so I've decided in favor of `nginx`.

I think that I'll write 2 of 3 posts about it, because it's too much to cover in only one. So here, I'd share how I was preparing my blog to be ready for dynamic environments.

So this is how my workflow looked like before I decided to use dynamic environments. 
- I'm editing `hugo` content while using `hugo server` locally
- Pushing changes to a `non-main` branch
- When everything is ready, I'm uploading pictures to the `minio` storage
- And merging a non-main branch to the main
- Drone-CI is downloading images from `minio` and builds a docker image with the `latest` tag
    - First step is to generate a static content by `hugo`
    - Second step is to put that static content in `nginx` container
- Drone-CI is pushing a new image to my registry
- `Keel` spots that images was updated and pulls it.
- Pod with a static is being recreated, and I have my blog with a new content

What I don't like about it? I can't test something unless it's in `production`. And when I stated to work on adding comments (that is still WIP) I've understood that I'd like to have a real environemnt where I can test everything before firing the main pipeline. Even though having a static development environment would be fine for me, because I'm the only one who do the development here, I don't like the concept of static envs, and I want to be able to work on different posts in the same time. Also, adding a new static environemnt for development purposes it kind of the same amount of work as implementing a solution for deploying them dynamically.

Before I can start deploying them, I have to prepare the application for that. At the first glance changes looks like that:

1. Container must not contain any static content
2. I can't use only latest tags anymore
3. Helm chart has a lot of stuff that's hardcoded
4. CI pipelines must be rewritten almost completely
5. Deployment process should be rethought

### Static Container
Static content doesn't play well with dynamic environments. I'd even say, doesn't play at all. So at least I must stop defining hostname for my blog on the build stage. One container should be able to run anywhere with the same result. So I've decided that instedd of putting the generated static content in the container with `nginx` on the build stage, I need to ship a container with source code to `Kubernetes`, generate static there and put it to a container with `nginx`. So before my deployment looked like that: 

```YAML
spec:
  containers:
    - image: git.badhouseplants.net/allanger/badhouseplants-net:latest
      imagePullPolicy: Always
      name: badhouseplants-net
```

And it was enough. Now it looks like that: 
```YAML
containers:
      - image: nginx:latest
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        name: nginx
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
          name: http
          protocol: TCP
        resources: {}
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /var/www
          name: public-content
          readOnly: true
        - mountPath: /etc/nginx/conf.d
          name: nginx-config
          readOnly: true
      initContainers:
      - args:
        - --baseURL
        - https://dynamic-charts-dev.badhouseplants.net/
        image: git.badhouseplants.net/allanger/badhouseplants-net:d727a51c0443eb4194bdaebf8ab0e94c0f228b06
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        name: badhouseplants-net
        resources: {}
        terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
        terminationMessagePolicy: File
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /src/static
          name: s3-data
          readOnly: true
        - mountPath: /src/public
          name: public-content
      restartPolicy: Always
      - emptyDir:
          sizeLimit: 1Gi
        name: public-content
      - configMap:
          defaultMode: 420
          name: nginx-config
        name: nginx-config
```

So in the `init` container I'm generating a static content (`--baseUrL` flag is templated with `Helm`). Putting the result to the directory that is mounted as en `emptyDir` volume. And then later I'm mounting this folder to a container with `nginx`. Now I can use my docker image wherever I'd like with the same result It doesn't depend on the hostmame that was fixed during the build.

### No more `latest`
Since I want to have my envs updated on each commit, I can't push only `latest` anymore. So I've decided to use `commit sha` as tags for my images. But it means that I'll have a lot of them now and having `300Mb` of images and other media is becoming very painful. That means that I need to stop putting images directly to container during the build. So instead of using `rclone` to get data from `minio` in a `drone` pipeline, I'm adding another `init` container to my deployment.   
```YAML
      initContainers:
      - args:
        - -c
        - rclone copy -P badhouseplants-public:/badhouseplants-static /static
        command:
        - sh
        env:
        - name: RCLONE_CONFIG
          value: /tmp/rclone.conf
        image: rclone/rclone:latest
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        name: rclone
        resources: {}
        terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
        terminationMessagePolicy: File
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /tmp
          name: rclone-config
          readOnly: true
        - mountPath: /static
          name: s3-data
      volumes:
      - name: rclone-config
        secret:
          defaultMode: 420
          secretName: rclone-config
      - emptyDir:
          sizeLimit: 1Gi
        name: s3-data
``` 

And also, I'm mounting the `s3-data` volume to the `hugo` container, so it can generate my blog with all images. 

### Helm chart should be more flexible

I had to find all the values, that should be different between different environments. And turned out, it's not a lot. 
1. Istio `VirtualServices` hostnames (Or Ingress hostname, if you don't use Istio)
2. Image tag for the container with the source code
3. And a hostname that should be passed to hugo as a base URL

So all of that I've put to `values.yaml`
```YAML
istio:
  hosts:
    - badhouseplants.net
  hugo:
  image:
    tag: $COMMIT_SHA
  baseURL: https://badhouseplants.net/
```

### CI pipelines
Now I need to push a new image on each commit instead of pushing only once the code made it to the main branch, But I also don't want to have something that doesn't work completely in my registry, because I'm self-hosting and ergo I care about storage. So before building and pushing an image, I need to to test it,

```YAML
# ---------------------------------------------------------------
# -- My Dockerfile is very small and easy, so it's not a problem 
# --  to duplicate its logic in a job. But I think that 
# --  a better way to implement this, would be to build an image
# --  with Dockerfile, run it, and push, if everything is fine
# ---------------------------------------------------------------
- name: Test a build
  image: klakegg/hugo
  commands:
    - hugo

- name: Build and push the docker image 
  image: plugins/docker
  settings: 
    registry: git.badhouseplants.net
    username: allanger
    password: 
      from_secret: GITEA_TOKEN
    repo: git.badhouseplants.net/allanger/badhouseplants-net
    tags: ${DRONE_COMMIT_SHA}
```