Installation overview

Warning

  • OpenAppStack is still under heavy development and is not ready for production use! We anticipate major changes and do not guarantee a data-preserving upgrade path from current installations. However, we encourage you to try OpenAppStack and ask you to report all issues you encounter.

  • When you install OpenAppStack on a server, the installation process will make some substantial changes to the server’s configuration, so please do not use a server that functions as anything other than a testing ground.

Note

You should also have a trusted machine to run the installer on, i.e. your laptop. We call this the provisioning machine. All commands in these installation instructions need to be run this provisioning machine that is not the server that will run OpenAppStack, unless specified otherwise.

Setup

Common prerequisites

Wether you want to create a kubernetes cluster first or want to install OpenAppStack on an existing cluster, these are the common prerequisites:

  • You need Python 3 with its development files, Pip and Git installed (apt install python3-pip python3-dev git on Debian)

  • We recommend using a python virtualenv to make sure we do not change any of your other projects. Install virtualenv by running pip3 install --user venv or apt install python3-venv.

Clone the OpenAppStack git repository

On your provisioning machine, clone the OpenAppStack git repository and checkout the latest release branch (currently v0.6):

$ git clone -b v0.7 https://open.greenhost.net/openappstack/openappstack.git
$ cd openappstack

Create a python virtual environment

Create a python virtual environment called “env” that uses python 3. This makes sure we do not change any of your other python projects. The second command “activates” the virtualenv.

Note

Activating the virtualenv means you will use that environment to install and run python programs instead of your global environment. If you close your terminal or open a new one, you need to activate the virtualenv again.

$ python3 -m venv env
$ . env/bin/activate

Install requirements

Next, install the OpenAppStack CLI client by running the following commands:

$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

OpenAppStack CLI client usage

Now you can run the OpenAppStack CLI as follows:

$ python -m openappstack CLUSTER_NAME <command>

The CLI always needs a CLUSTER_NAME argument. Even for getting subcommand help messages. Be sure to run this command in the root directory of the git repository. In this tutorial, we’re using oas.example.org as the cluster name. Try it out by running

$ python -m openappstack oas.example.org --help

Installation options

  1. If you want to create a Kubernetes cluster from scratch on a dedicated server or virtual machine please start with Create a kubernetes cluster and then continue with Install OpenAppStack.

  2. If you want to install Openappstack on an existing Kubernetes cluster you can skip the above instructions and start with Install OpenAppStack.