Keel - automated Kubernetes deployments for the rest of us

• Website https://keel.sh
• Slack - kubernetes.slack.com look for channel #keel

Keel is a tool for automating Kubernetes deployment updates. Keel is stateless, robust and lightweight.

Keel provides several key features:

• Kubernetes and Helm providers - Keel has direct integrations with Kubernetes and Helm.

• No CLI/API - tired of f***ctl for everything? Keel doesn't have one. Gets job done through labels, annotations, charts.

• Semver policies - specify update policy for each deployment/Helm release individually.

• Automatic Google Container Registry configuration - Keel automatically sets up topic and subscriptions for your deployment images by periodically scanning your environment.

• Native, DockerHub, Quay and Azure container registry webhooks support - once webhook is received impacted deployments will be identified and updated.

• Polling - when webhooks and pubsub aren't available - Keel can still be useful by checking Docker Registry for new tags (if current tag is semver) or same tag SHA digest change (ie: latest).

• Notifications - out of the box Keel has Slack, Hipchat, Mattermost and standard webhook notifications, more info here

Support

Support Keel's development by:

• Patreon
• Paypal
• Star this repository
• Follow on Twitter

Warp speed quick start

To achieve warp speed, we will be using sunstone.dev service and Minikube.

Start Minikube:

minikube start

Install customized Keel (feel free to change credentials, namespace and version tag) straight from your kubectl.

# To override default latest semver tag, add &tag=x.x.x query argument to the URL below
kubectl apply -f https://sunstone.dev/keel?namespace=default&username=admin&password=admin&tag=latest
# and get Keel IP:
minikube service --namespace default keel --url
http://192.168.99.100:3199

We are overriding default latest semver tag with latest since it has the new UI. If you want to use latest semver, just remove the &tag=latest part from the URL.

Creating remotely accessible Keel instance

Keel can work together with webhook relay tunnels. To deploy Keel with Webhook Relay sidecar you will need to get a token, then pre-create a tunnel and:

kubectl apply -f https://sunstone.dev/keel?namespace=default&username=admin&password=admin&relay_key=TOKEN_KEY&relay_secret=TOKEN_SECRET&relay_tunnel=TUNNEL_NAME&tag=latest

Now, you can access Keel remotely.

Helm quick start

Prerequisites:

• Helm
• Kubernetes

You need to add this Chart repo to Helm:

helm repo add keel https://charts.keel.sh 
helm repo update

Install through Helm (with Helm provider enabled by default):

helm upgrade --install keel --namespace=kube-system keel/keel

If you work mostly with regular Kubernetes manifests, you can install Keel without Helm provider support:

helm upgrade --install keel --namespace=keel keel/keel --set helmProvider.enabled="false" 

To install for Helm v3, set helmProvider.version="v3" (default is "v2"):

helm install keel keel/keel --set helmProvider.version="v3" 

That's it, see Configuration section now.

Quick Start

A step-by-step guide to install Keel on your Kubernetes cluster is viewable on the Keel website:

https://keel.sh/examples/#example-1-push-to-deploy

Configuration

Once Keel is deployed, you only need to specify update policy on your deployment file or Helm chart:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata: 
  name: wd
  namespace: default
  labels: 
    name: "wd"
  annotations:
    keel.sh/policy: minor # <-- policy name according to https://semver.org/
    keel.sh/trigger: poll # <-- actively query registry, otherwise defaults to webhooks
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      name: wd
      labels:
        app: wd        
    spec:
      containers:                    
        - image: karolisr/webhook-demo:0.0.8
          imagePullPolicy: Always            
          name: wd
          command: ["/bin/webhook-demo"]
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8090

No additional configuration is required. Enabling continuous delivery for your workloads has never been this easy!

Documentation

Documentation is viewable on the Keel Website:

https://keel.sh/docs/#introduction

Contributing

Before starting to work on some big or medium features - raise an issue here so we can coordinate our efforts.

We use pull requests, so:

1. Fork this repository
2. Create a branch on your local copy with a sensible name
3. Push to your fork and open a pull request

Developing Keel

If you wish to work on Keel itself, you will need Go 1.12+ installed. Make sure you put Keel into correct Gopath and go build (dependency management is done through dep).

To test Keel while developing:

1. Launch a Kubernetes cluster like Minikube or Docker for Mac with Kubernetes.
2. Change config to use it: kubectl config use-context docker-for-desktop
3. Build Keel from cmd/keel directory.
4. Start Keel with: keel --no-incluster. This will use Kubeconfig from your home.

Running unit tests

Get a test parser (makes output nice):

go get github.com/mfridman/tparse

To run unit tests:

make test

Running e2e tests

Prerequisites:

• configured kubectl + kubeconfig
• a running cluster (test suite will create testing namespaces and delete them after tests)
• Go environment (will compile Keel before running)

Once prerequisites are ready:

make e2e