Hey everyone! 👋 New to the cluster tooling side of things, but I've been using Jira and Confluence for years to manage our projects. Now I'm trying to bring some of that order to our k8s deployments.
I've been reading about Flux and Helm together for a proper GitOps workflow. It sounds perfect for what we need, but I'm hitting a wall trying to piece it all together. I want our Helm charts and values to live in git, with Flux automating the deployments, but I keep getting tangled in the repo structure and the initial bootstrap.
What would you recommend for a simple starting point? Like, how do you structure your repos? And what's the most straightforward way to get that first Flux installation going without it feeling like magic?
Hey! Welcome to the cluster side, it's a fun (and sometimes frustrating) shift from Jira 😅
You're right on the money wanting Helm and Flux together. That "tangled in repo structure" feeling is totally normal. For a simple start, I'd recommend a mono-repo approach with two main directories: `/charts` for your custom Helm charts and `/deploy` for your Flux manifests (like HelmReleases and Kustomizations). It keeps things visible while you're learning.
The simplest bootstrap is using the `flux bootstrap` command with the `--components-extra=helm-controller` flag. It feels a bit magical the first time, but watching it create the commits in your git repo demystifies it a lot. The key is to remember Flux is just another controller watching your git repo - you tell it what to watch, and it does the sync.
What are you thinking of deploying first? A simple web app chart?