Install/Uninstall the Traffic Manager

Telepresence uses a traffic manager to send/receive cloud traffic to the user. Telepresence uses Helm under the hood to install the traffic manager in your cluster. The telepresence binary embeds both helm and a helm-chart for a traffic-manager that is of the same version as the binary.

The Telepresence Helm chart documentation is published at ArtifactHUB.

You can also use helm command directly, see Install With Helm for more details.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you need to have Telepresence installed.

If you are not the administrator of your cluster, you will need administrative RBAC permissions to install and use Telepresence in your cluster.

In addition, you may need certain prerequisites depending on your cloud provider and platform. See the cloud provider installation notes for more.

Install the Traffic Manager

The telepresence cli can install the traffic manager for you. The basic install will install the same version as the client used.

1. Install the Telepresence Traffic Manager with the following command:

   telepresence helm install

Customizing the Traffic Manager.

For details on what the Helm chart installs and what can be configured, see the Helm chart configuration on artifacthub.

1. Create a values.yaml file with your config values.

2. Run the install command with the --values flag set to the path to your values file:

   telepresence helm install --values values.yaml

   alternatively, provide values using the --set flag:

   telepresence helm install --set logLevel=debug

Install into custom namespace

The Helm chart supports being installed into any namespace, not necessarily ambassador. Simply pass a different namespace argument to telepresence helm install. For example, if you wanted to deploy the traffic manager to the staging namespace:

telepresence helm install traffic-manager --namespace staging datawire/telepresence

Note that users of Telepresence will need to configure their kubeconfig to find this installation of the Traffic Manager:

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    server: https://127.0.0.1
    extensions:
    - name: telepresence.io
      extension:
        cluster:
          defaultManagerNamespace: staging
  name: example-cluster

or add the config the config.yml:

cluster:
 defaultManagerNamespace: staging

See the kubeconfig documentation for more information.

Upgrading/Downgrading the Traffic Manager.

1. Download the cli of the version of Telepresence you wish to use.

2. Run the upgrade command. Optionally with --values and/or --set flags

   telepresence helm upgrade

   You can also use the --reuse-values or --reset-values to specify if previously installed values should be reused or reset.

Uninstall

The telepresence cli can uninstall the traffic manager for you using the telepresence helm uninstall.

1. Uninstall the Telepresence Traffic Manager and all the agents installed by it using the following command:

   telepresence helm uninstall

RBAC

Installing a namespace-scoped traffic manager

You might not want the Traffic Manager to have permissions across the entire kubernetes cluster, or you might want to be able to install multiple traffic managers per cluster (for example, to separate them by environment). In these cases, the traffic manager supports being installed with a namespace scope, allowing cluster administrators to limit the reach of a traffic manager's permissions.

For example, suppose you want a Traffic Manager that only works on namespaces dev and staging. To do this, create a values.yaml like the following:

managerRbac:
  create: true
  namespaced: true
  namespaces:
  - dev
  - staging

This can then be installed via:

telepresence helm install --namespace staging -f ./values.yaml

NOTE Do not install namespace-scoped Traffic Managers and a global Traffic Manager in the same cluster, as it could have unexpected effects.

Namespace collision detection

The Telepresence Helm chart will try to prevent namespace-scoped Traffic Managers from managing the same namespaces. It will do this by creating a ConfigMap, called traffic-manager-claim, in each namespace that a given install manages.

So, for example, suppose you install one Traffic Manager to manage namespaces dev and staging, as:

telepresence helm install --namespace dev --set 'managerRbac.namespaced=true' --set 'managerRbac.namespaces={dev,staging}'

You might then attempt to install another Traffic Manager to manage namespaces staging and prod:

telepresence helm install --namespace prod --set 'managerRbac.namespaced=true' --set 'managerRbac.namespaces={staging,prod}'

This would fail with an error:

Error: rendered manifests contain a resource that already exists. Unable to continue with install: ConfigMap "traffic-manager-claim" in namespace "staging" exists and cannot be imported into the current release: invalid ownership metadata; annotation validation error: key "meta.helm.sh/release-namespace" must equal "prod": current value is "dev"

To fix this error, fix the overlap either by removing staging from the first install, or from the second.

Namespace scoped user permissions

Optionally, you can also configure user rbac to be scoped to the same namespaces as the manager itself. You might want to do this if you don't give your users permissions throughout the cluster, and want to make sure they only have the minimum set required to perform telepresence commands on certain namespaces.

Continuing with the dev and staging example from the previous section, simply add the following to values.yaml (make sure you set the subjects!):

clientRbac:
  create: true

  # These are the users or groups to which the user rbac will be bound.
  # This MUST be set.
  subjects: {}
  # - kind: User
  #   name: jane
  #   apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io

  namespaced: true

  namespaces:
  - dev
  - staging

Installing RBAC only

Telepresence Traffic Manager does require some RBAC for the traffic-manager deployment itself, as well as for users. To make it easier for operators to introspect / manage RBAC separately, you can use rbac.only=true to only create the rbac-related objects. Additionally, you can use clientRbac.create=true and managerRbac.create=true to toggle which subset(s) of RBAC objects you wish to create.

Install with Helm

Before you begin, you must ensure that the helm command is installed.

The Telepresence Helm chart is published at GitHub in the ghcr.io repository.

Installing

Install the latest stable version of the traffic-manager into the default "ambassador" namespace with the following command:

helm install --create-namespace --namespace ambassador traffic-manager oci://ghcr.io/telepresenceio/telepresence-oss

Upgrading/Downgrading

Use this command if you installed the Traffic Manager into the "ambassador" namespace, and you just wish to upgrade it to the latest version without changing any configuration values:

helm upgrade --namespace ambassador --reuse-values traffic-manager oci://ghcr.io/telepresenceio/telepresence-oss

If you want to upgrade (or downgrade) the Traffic Manager to a specific version, add a --version flag with the version number to the upgrade command, e.g.: --version v2.20.3.

Uninstalling

Use the following command to uninstall the Traffic Manager:

helm uninstall --namespace ambassador traffic-manager