4. Configure the Provider

Once you've completed steps 1-3 on the previous pages you should have all the values at hand to configure Garden's Kubernetes plugin.

In particular, you should have:

• The context for your Kubernetes cluster (see step 1).

• The name(s) and namespace(s) of the ImagePullSecret(s) used by your cluster (see step 2).

• The hostname for your services (see step 3).

• A TLS secret (optional) (see step 3).

Now we can finally add them to our Garden config.

1. Add initial config

First, add your values to the project level Garden configuration file at the root of your project:

apiVersion: garden.io/v1
kind: Project

environments:
  - name: remote
    variables:
      hostname: <THE HOSTNAME FROM STEP 3>

providers:
  - name: kubernetes
    environments: [remote]
    imagePullSecrets: # You can set multiple secrets here
      - name: <THE IMAGE PULL SECRET FROM STEP 2>
        namespace: <THE IMAGE PULL SECRET NAMESPACE FROM STEP 2>
    deploymentRegistry:
      hostname: <THE REGISTRY HOSTNAME CONFIGURED IN STEP 2>
      namespace: <THE REGISTRY NAMESPACE CONFIGURED IN STEP 2>
    context: <THE KUBE CONTEXT FROM STEP 1>
    defaultHostname: <THE HOSTNAME FROM STEP 3>

Garden does NOT inject the image pull secret into the Deployment (unless you're using the container Deploy type). So if you're using e.g. the kubernetes or helm action types you need to make sure the imagePullSecret field is set in the corresponding manifest / Helm chart. See also the official Kubernetes docs for setting image pull secrets.

2. Select build mode

Next, select a "build mode".

You can choose between building your images locally with Docker using the local-docker build mode or remotely, in the cluster itself.

Note that even if you choose the local-docker build mode, you still need to configure a container registry that Garden can push to and set an ImagePullSecret so that Kubernetes can pull your images.

In general, we recommend doing remote building with the cluster-buildkit build mode.

This means you don't need Docker running on your laptop and you're able to share build caches with your team and across environments.

To use the cluster-buildkit build mode, add the following to your configuration:

providers:
  - name: kubernetes
    buildMode: "cluster-buildkit" # <--- Add this
    # ...

We also recommend taking a look at our in-depth guide on build modes which explains the pros and cons of different modes and how to configure them.

3. Initialize the plugin

Finally, initialize the plugin by running:

garden plugins kubernetes cluster-init

And that's it! Your Kubernetes plugin is now configured and you can proceed to deploying your project to Kubernetes with Garden.

Next, we recommend learning more about configuring Kubernetes actions.