Quickstart
In this tutorial, we'll grab the Nginx Docker image, configure it for Jetpack.io, and deploy it to Kubernetes – all in 5 minutes.
Prerequisites
Docker is required to package your backend as a container before deploying to the cloud.
If you don't already have Docker installed as part of your development environment, follow one of the guides below before returning to this quickstart:
kubectl, while not required, is a useful tool for inspecting and managing your deployments in Kubernetes. We recommend following the installation directions for your platform:
Initialize the project with Launchpad
Launchpad needs some initial configuration to understand the image's web process. We need only do this once per website.
To install the Launchpad CLI, open a terminal and run
curl -fsSL https://get.jetpack.io/launchpad | bash
Launchpad CLI works on Linux, macOS, and on Windows via WSL2.
Login to Launchpad CLI:
launchpad auth login
Logging into Launchpad allows you to deploy to the Launchpad Kubernetes cluster. You can also run on your own cluster in your Azure, AWS, GCP, or private cloud account.
Initialize the project for Launchpad:
launchpad init
This wizard interviews you and configures the launchpad deployment strategy to match your application.
Answer that Yes, this is a web server. This tells Launchpad that we want to accept inbound traffic.
If we were building a scheduled cron job or a function that drained a queue, we could answer no.
Finish the wizard, and Launchpad CLI automatically generates an appropriate
launchpad.yaml
file. You should commit this to source control.
Customize the launchpad.yaml
file
Launchpad assumes your web server is running on port 8080
from inside a Docker container. In this section we'll customize the launchpad.yaml
file to host the Nginx image which runs on port 80
.
Open the
launchpad.yaml
file in your favorite editor.Change the
port
line to80
.Add a new line specifying the Docker image:
port: 80
image: nginx:alpine
Deploy to Kubernetes using Launchpad
Now that the project is configured for Launchpad, deploying is really easy.
Open a terminal in the directory with the Dockerfile and launchpad.yaml file.
Deploy to Kubernetes:
launchpad up
Now Launchpad makes the deployment really simple. Automatically it will:
- Build the Docker image
- Push the image to a private registry
- Schedule the necessary Kubernetes resources
- Create a publicly routable URL to test the website
Test the website:
In the console output will be the publicly routable URL. Click this URL to view the web page.
Next Steps
It's easy to deploy any container image to Kubernetes with Launchpad. In this tutorial we scaffolded a website, configured it for Launchpad, and used Launchpad to deploy to Kubernetes. Launchpad is a great zero-DevOps solution for deploying to Kubernetes. Visit https://jetpack.io/launchpad/docs/ to learn more and to start deploying your content to Kubernetes with ease.