Installing Linkerd with Helm

    The identity component of Linkerd requires setting up a trust anchor certificate, and an issuer certificate with its key. These must use the ECDSA P-256 algorithm and need to be provided to Helm by the user (unlike when using the linkerd install CLI which can generate these automatically). You can provide your own, or follow these instructions to generate new ones.

    Adding Linkerd’s Helm repository

    The following instructions use the linkerd repo. For installing an edge release, just replace with linkerd-edge.

    1. # set expiry date one year from now, in Mac:
    2. exp=$(date -v+8760H +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")
    3. # in Linux:
    4. exp=$(date -d '+8760 hour' +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")
    5. helm install linkerd2 \
    6.   --set-file identityTrustAnchorsPEM=ca.crt \
    7.   --set-file identity.issuer.tls.crtPEM=issuer.crt \
    8.   --set-file identity.issuer.tls.keyPEM=issuer.key \
    9.   --set identity.issuer.crtExpiry=$exp \
    10.   linkerd/linkerd2

    Note

    For Helm versions < v3, --name flag has to specifically be passed. In Helm v3, It has been deprecated, and is the first argument as specified above.

    The chart values will be picked from the chart’s values.yaml file.

    You can override the values in that file by providing your own values.yaml file passed with a -f option, or overriding specific values using the family of --set flags like we did above for certificates.

    Disabling The Proxy Init Container

    The chart contains a file values-ha.yaml that overrides some default values as to set things up under a high-availability scenario, analogous to the --ha option in linkerd install. Values such as higher number of replicas, higher memory/cpu limits and affinities are specified in that file.

    You can get ahold of values-ha.yaml by fetching the chart files:

    Then use the -f flag to provide the override file, for example:

    1. ## see above on how to set $exp
    2. helm install linkerd2 \
    3.   --set-file identityTrustAnchorsPEM=ca.crt \
    4.   --set-file identity.issuer.tls.crtPEM=issuer.crt \
    5.   --set-file identity.issuer.tls.keyPEM=issuer.key \
    6.   -f linkerd2/values-ha.yaml \
    7.   linkerd/linkerd2

    Note

    For Helm versions < v3, --name flag has to specifically be passed. In Helm v3, It has been deprecated, and is the first argument as specified above.

    Customizing the Namespace

    To install Linkerd to a different namespace than the default linkerd, override the Namespace variable.

    1. The namespace is labeled with
    2. The installNamespace is set to false

    3. The namespace variable is overridden with the name of your namespace

      Note

    In Helm v3 the --namespace option must be used with an existing namespace.

    Make sure your local Helm repos are updated:

    The helm upgrade command has a number of flags that allow you to customize its behaviour. The ones that special attention should be paid to are --reuse-values and --reset-values and how they behave when charts change from version to version and/or overrides are applied through --set and --set-file. To summarize there are the following prominent cases that can be observed:

    • --reuse-values with no overrides - all values are reused
    • --reuse-values with overrides - all except the values that are overridden are reused
    • --reset-values with no overrides - no values are reused and all changes from provided release are applied during the upgrade
    • --reset-values with overrides - no values are reused and changed from provided release are applied together with the overrides
    • no flag and no overrides - --reuse-values will be used by default
    • no flag and overrides - --reset-values will be used by default

    Bearing all that in mind, you have to decide whether you want to reuse the values in the chart or move to the values specified in the newer chart. The advised practice is to use a values.yaml file that stores all custom overrides that you have for your chart. Before upgrade, check whether there are breaking changes to the chart (i.e. renamed or moved keys, etc). You can consult the edge or the chart docs, depending on which one your are upgrading to. If there are, make the corresponding changes to your values.yaml file. Then you can use: