Overview
This guide goes over how to deploy your services with the Plural CLI. At the end of this tutorial, you will have:
Provisioned new clusters, and/or deployed the Plural Deployment Operator on your existing clusters.
Imported the Git repositories containing your code and manifests.
Deployed your code onto your clusters of choice.
Optionally updated any configurations and permissions for the clusters and services.
Info:
If you want to get started quickly or want us to manage the Plural experience for you, we strongly recommend using Plural Cloud.
We'll handle hosting Plural for you, but also it comes with automatic integration with Github and observability with Elastic and Prometheus set up by default. It should seriously reduce DevOps TCO, especially for resource-constrained teams.
Install the Plural CLI
The Plural CLI is available on Homebrew, a single line installation can be done with:
brew install pluralsh/plural/plural
If you are using a machine that is not compatible with Homebrew, we recommend simply downloading a pre-built release on GitHub and installing it onto your machines path. The latest release can be found on GitHub or downloaded with the following commands:
VERSION=$(curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest | jq -r '.tag_name' | tr -d v) curl -L https://github.com/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest/download/plural-cli_"$VERSION"_Linux_amd64.tar.gz | tar zx
VERSION=$(curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest | jq -r '.tag_name' | tr -d v) curl -L https://github.com/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest/download/plural-cli_"$VERSION"_Linux_arm64.tar.gz | tar zx
VERSION=$(curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest | jq -r '.tag_name' | tr -d v) curl -L https://github.com/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest/download/plural-cli_"$VERSION"_Darwin_amd64.tar.gz | tar zx
VERSION=$(curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest | jq -r '.tag_name' | tr -d v) curl -L https://github.com/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest/download/plural-cli_"$VERSION"_Darwin_arm64.tar.gz | tar zx
VERSION=$(curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest | jq -r '.tag_name' | tr -d v) curl -L https://github.com/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest/download/plural-cli_"$VERSION"_Windows_amd64.tar.gz | tar zx
VERSION=$(curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest | jq -r '.tag_name' | tr -d v) curl -L https://github.com/pluralsh/plural-cli/releases/latest/download/plural-cli_"$VERSION"_Windows_arm64.tar.gz | tar zx
Onboard to Plural and install the Plural Console
If you haven't already, you'll need to follow the Plural guide to install Console. There are two recommended ways to do this:
Bring Your Own Cluster - you've created a kubernetes cluster your way with all the main prequisites. You can use helm to install the management plane and then use the Console to manage itself from there.
plural up- a single command to create a new management cluster on the major clouds, wire up a basic GitOps setup and get you started.
Both are pretty flexible, and even if you chose to use the BYOK method, we recommend looking into some of our example plural up repos to get some ideas on how to use our CRDs and terraform provider with all the other tools they'll commonly touch. You can see an example plural up repository here.
Use plural up to create your first management console
First you'll want to follow our guide here to install our CLI. Once you've done this, you'll simply run:
plural up # optionally add --service-account <email> if you want to use a service account to group manage this console
Neutral:
plural up is best run in an empty repo. That will let it oauth to github/gitlab and create the repository for you, alongside registering pull deploy keys to register it in your new console.
This will do a few things:
create a new repo to house your IaC and yaml manifests
execute terraform to create the new cluster
execute another terraform stack to provision the GitOps setup for the Plural Console and any other services you'd like to deploy from that repo
We've also generated a README that should give an overview of how the repo can be used for things like:
creating and registering new workload clusters with terraform
adding new services in the main infra repo
handling updates to the cluster terraform at your own pace
Set Up the plural cd CLI
If you'd like to configure the plural cli to communicate with your new Console instance, the configuration process is pretty simple, you'll need to set your Console URL and Console token. Set them with:
plural cd login
Info:
You'll need to generate an access token to perform this command, it'll be available at https://{your-console-url}/profile/access-tokens
or alternatively you can run the env vars PLURAL_CONSOLE_URL and PLURAL_CONSOLE_TOKEN or set them directly in the config file ~/.plural/console.yml
To validate your cli is properly configured, simply run plural cd clusters list