Template CLI Enterprise

The Enterprise gitops CLI tool provides a set of commands to help you manage your templates.

Here we're going to talk about the gitops create template command that allows you to render templates locally and airgapped, without a full WGE installation in a Kubernetes cluster.

Use cases

• In CI/CD systems where you want to render a template and then use the raw output in a pipeline
• For quickly debugging templates

Restrictions

The gitops create template command only works with GitOpsTemplate objects. It does not work with CAPITemplate objects. You should be able to migrate any CAPITemplate objects to GitOpsTemplate with some small tweaks.

info

GitOpsTemplate or CAPITemplate?

The only difference between CAPITemplate and GitOpsTemplate is the default value of these two annotations:

Annotation	default value for CAPITemplate	default value for GitOpsTemplate
templates.weave.works/add-common-bases	"true"	"false"
templates.weave.works/inject-prune-annotations	"true"	"false"

Installation

See the Weave Gitops Enterprise installation instructions for details on how to install the EE gitops CLI tool.

Getting started

Using a local GitOpsTemplate manifest (such as this CAPD example) with required parameters exported in the environment, the command can render the template to one of the following:

1. The current kubecontext directly (default)
2. stdout with --export
3. The local file system with --output-dir, this will use the spec.resourcestemplates[].path fields in the template to determine where to write the rendered files. This is the recommended approach for GitOps as you can then commit the rendered files to your repository.

gitops create template \
  --template-file capd-template.yaml \
  --output-dir ./clusters/ \
  --values CLUSTER_NAME=foo

Profiles

As in the UI you can add profiles to your template. However instead of reading the latest version of a profile and its layers from a HelmRepository object in the cluster, we instead read from your local helm cache.

helm repo add weaveworks-charts https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weaveworks/weave-gitops-profile-examples/gh-pages
helm repo update

This particular helm repo provides a version of the cert-manager repo and others.

Supplying values to a profile

You can supply a values.yaml file to a profile using the values parameter. For example we can supply cert-manager's values.yaml with:

gitops create template \
  --template-file capd-template.yaml \
  --output-dir ./out \
  --values CLUSTER_NAME=foo \
  --profiles "name=cert-manager,namespace=foo,version=>0.1,values=cert-manager-values.yaml"

Using a config file

Instead of specifying the parameters on the command line you can supply a config file. For example the above invocation can be replaced like so:

config.yaml

template-file: capd-capi-template.yaml
output-dir: ./out
values:
  - CLUSTER_NAME=foo
profiles:
  - name=cert-manager,namespace=foo,version=>0.1,values=cert-manager-values.yaml

and executed with:

gitops create template --config config.yaml