Bring Your Own Kubernetes

Unbind is installed with Helmfile from the charts in the repository. They work on managed clusters such as EKS, GKE, AKS and DOKS, and on your own.

Before you start

• Use a new cluster. Unbind installs an ingress layer, cert-manager, a logging stack and a metrics stack. They will collide with ones you already have.
• A default storage class has to exist. Most managed clusters have one.
• A wildcard domain pointing at the cluster's load balancer, like *.unbind.example.com.
• Helm, the helm-diff plugin and Helmfile on your machine.

Install

git clone https://github.com/unbindapp/unbind.git
cd unbind

helmfile --file deploy/charts/helmfile.yaml.gotmpl \
  --state-values-set unbindDomain=unbind.example.com \
  --state-values-set wildcardBaseDomain=unbind.example.com \
  --state-values-set unbindVersion=v0.1.81 \
  sync

Use the latest version from the releases page. Everything lands in the unbind-system namespace.

Things that differ from the installer

deploy/charts/README.md in the repository is the reference. The points that matter most:

• Registry: the built-in registry is reached from every node at a fixed cluster IP, which each node's container runtime has to trust. On k3s that is /etc/rancher/k3s/registries.yaml. On managed clusters, use an external registry instead and set the externalRegistry values.
• Networking: networkingProvider picks how traffic gets in. The default is the Gateway API with Envoy Gateway. A cluster that already uses ingress-nginx has to set it to nginx.
• Build workers run one per node, so their replica count cannot exceed the number of nodes.
• Bringing your own logging or metrics: you can turn components off, but then Unbind cannot configure them from the UI, and they have to be set up the way Unbind expects. Logs need the unbind-team, unbind-project, unbind-environment, unbind-service and unbind-deployment labels indexed. Metrics need kube-state-metrics started with --metric-labels-allowlist=pods=[*].

What you do not get

The unbind command on the server, adding servers through it, and the storage setup are all part of the installer. On your own cluster, nodes and storage are yours to manage.