I have a small VPS that hosts some services I use daily and I’d like to migrate that to a K8s cluster. One of the services being hosted is my personal website, built with Hugo and served by Caddy.
Right now, I have the code for my website on Codeberg and I have a CI pipeline that builds the website and uploads it to my VPS via rsync.
I want to move the website to the k8s cluster, but I have no idea how to do it “securely”. What I have right now is a separate user on my VPS called deploy and it rsyncs the files to the data directory Caddy is using to serve my files.
I thought I could do the same on the k8s cluster server, but it’s usually not a good idea to mount host paths with k8s unless absolutely necessary, because container escaping is an actual problem.
So far the only alternative I could think of is to change the CI pipeline to publish my website on another branch and signal it to my K8s cluster so the files should be updated, but I’d like to know what better options exist and how easy they are to setup.
You need to start with docker.
Get your ci building a docker image of your site
Then host the docker image on a repo somewhere.
Once you have it running in a container you can easily find a “how to” for k8s.
The basics of k8s are:
A collection (or single in this case) of images form a pod (virtual machine) that pod exposes ports to a service.
The service is a single app comprised of a collection of pods (usually only one actually)
The service then needs to expose ports to an ingress (think of an ingress like a load balancer) and the ingress will take the external ports to the cluster and use some magic to forward traffic to you pod
The docker image needs to actually host the site, so more than just files, you’ll need nginx in the image.
K8s is WAY over complicated for this, it’s designed for auto scaling and self healing, but I’m assuming you’re using this as a “cool” or “learning” exercise.
Helm packages for k8s are super helpful and will give you a template for all the networking pieces
That’s a nice suggestion. I guess I can make the CI build a Docker image containing my website’s files and then have a plugin for it to restart the pod that serves the website so it fetches the latest image.
K8s is that “restart” mechanism.
Docker images are just the thing that it restarts.
Docker itself or “docker compose” can restart images and do everything you need, but if you want to go the full k8s it’s complicated but great learning
One simple way to pull the new image into your cluster is to overwrite the
latesttag, specifyimagePullPolicy: Alwaysin your deployment and then usekubectl rollout restart deployment my-static-sitefrom within your pipeline. Kubernetes will then terminate all pods and replace them with new ones that pull the latest image.You can also work with versioned tags and
kubectl set image deployment/my-static-site site=my/image:version. This might be a bit nicer and allowsimagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent, but you have to pass your version number into your pipeline somehow, e.g. with git tags.
I was looking for it as well. I want to host the website using Caddy because I have a lot of config options available and I can fine tune it for my use cases.
I read a tutorial about using a Hugo Docker image, but then the hosting would be done by Hugo and not Caddy itself.
look up a tutorial on “dockerfile” as you’re essentially making one that installs your app.
Dockerfiles are basically “install” scripts that define how to set up a new machine with your application.
You’ll want to start with a base docker image that already has 90% of what you need.
look up docker hub nginx images and just create a docker file to populate your app to the nginx that’s already been installed there. Use the nginx image as your “source image” in docker.
It acts like a virtual machine template to launch your own docker image
