How To

Need to interact with your managed environment? This section provides clear instructions on key workflows—such as handling escalations, requesting changes, or understanding monitoring reports. Find step-by-step guidance on how to collaborate with Playground Tech for a seamless cloud experience.

Prerequisites

Many guides in this section use Helm for deploying applications. While we default to Argo CD for deployments to clusters in the cloud environments, it can be very useful to have Helm installed locally for testing and development purposes.

Installing Helm

Install Helm on your local machine:

macOS (Homebrew):

brew install helm

Windows (Chocolatey):

choco install kubernetes-helm

Windows (Scoop):

scoop install helm

Linux (Script):

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

Verify your installation:

helm version

For additional installation methods, see the official Helm documentation.

Local Development and Validation

Before deploying to a cluster, you can use Helm locally to validate your configuration and preview the Kubernetes resources that will be created.

Setting Up Your Chart

Create a directory structure for your application:

mkdir my-application && cd my-application

Create Chart.yaml:

apiVersion: v2
name: my-application
version: 0.0.1
dependencies:
  - name: pgt-application
    version: 0.0.3
    repository: oci://public.ecr.aws/w9m9e0e9/pgt-helm-charts

Create values.yaml with your configuration (see examples in previous sections).

Pulling the Chart

Download the chart dependency to your local machine:

helm dependency update

This creates a charts/ directory containing the pgt-application chart.

To inspect the chart's default values:

helm show values charts/pgt-application-0.0.3.tgz

Previewing Resources with helm template

Use helm template to render the Kubernetes manifests without deploying:

helm template my-release . -f values.yaml

This outputs all the Kubernetes resources that would be created. To save the output to a file:

helm template my-release . -f values.yaml > rendered-manifests.yaml

Filtering Template Output

To view only specific resources, combine with grep or yq:

# View only Deployment resources
helm template my-release . -f values.yaml | yq 'select(.kind == "Deployment")'

# View only Service resources
helm template my-release . -f values.yaml | yq 'select(.kind == "Service")'

# View resource names and kinds
helm template my-release . -f values.yaml | yq '[.kind, .metadata.name] | join(": ")'

Validating Against a Cluster

If you have access to a Kubernetes cluster, use --dry-run to validate the rendered manifests against the cluster's API server without actually creating resources:

helm template my-release . -f values.yaml | kubectl apply --dry-run=server -f -

This catches issues like:

• Invalid field names or values

• Missing required fields

• API version incompatibilities

• Resource quota violations

Linting Your Chart

Check for common issues and best practices:

helm lint .

For stricter validation:

helm lint . --strict

Debugging Tips

Debug template rendering issues:

helm template my-release . -f values.yaml --debug

Compare configurations:

When changing values, compare the rendered output to see what changed:

# Render with old values
helm template my-release . -f values-old.yaml > old.yaml

# Render with new values
helm template my-release . -f values-new.yaml > new.yaml

# Compare
diff old.yaml new.yaml

Validate specific values:

Test different configurations without modifying values.yaml:

# Override a single value
helm template my-release . -f values.yaml --set pgt-application.deployment.replicas=5

# Override multiple values
helm template my-release . -f values.yaml \
  --set pgt-application.container.image.tag=2.0.0 \
  --set pgt-application.autoscaling.maxReplicas=20