Hello Everyone,

Today we are going to learn how to create a manifest file for Kubernetes using monokle. So you might be wondering now what is Monokle.

Well Monokle is the easy-to-use desktop UI to manage Kubernetes manifests.

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How Monokle will help you:

1. Forget creating manifest YAML files manually. Monokle will do it for you with just a single form-based inputs.

2. Create templates and manage your plugins with just a Github repository.

3. Speeds up your development flow.

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Setting Up

1. Download Monokle here

2. After installing it you will see the welcome screen as shown in below image.

3. Open any code editor of your choice. ( I like to use vscode)

4. Create package.json file

{
    "name": "Templates plugin",
    "description": "Custom templates plugin",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "author": "Tejas Bachhav",
    "repository": "https://github.com/tejas-2232/monokle_template-plugin",
    "monoklePlugin": {
        "id": "com.github.tejas-2232.plugin.templates",
        "helpUrl": "https://github.com/tejas-2232/monokle_template-plugin",
        "modules": [{
            "type": "template",
            "path": "basic-pod-template"
        }]
    }
}

5. On the same directory level, Create a folder named bassic-pod-template and create a monokle-template.json file in it.

{
    "name": "Basic Kubernetes Pod",
    "id": "com.github.tejas-2232.plugin.templates.basic-pod-template",
    "author": "Tejas Bachhav",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "description": "This file creates a Pod for a specified Image",
    "repository": "",
    "type": "vanilla",
    "forms": [
      {
        "name": "Pod Settings",
        "description": "Specify the settings for your Pod",
        "schema": "form-schema.json",
        "uiSchema": "form-ui-schema.json"
      }
    ],
    "manifests": [
      {
        "filePath": "template.yaml"
      }
    ],
    "resultMessage": "Pod resource created successfully!",
    "helpUrl": "https://github.com/tejas-2232/monokle_template-plugin"
  }

6. Create form-schema file

In the code above, 2 fields are defined specially, form-schema.json and form-ui-schema.json. Both of these fields are used by Monokle to provide users of our template with a nice input form. The form-schema.json file will contain the form fields that we will request the user to input, and the form-ui-schema.json defines how the form is going to appear (titles for the fields, descriptions, etc). And we successfully created a K8 Manifest file

{
    "type": "object",
    "required": [
      "name",
      "image"
    ],
    "properties": {
      "name": {
        "type": "string",
        "default": "my-pod"
      },
      "namespace": {
        "type": "string"
      },
      "image": {
        "type": "string"
      }
    }
  }

7. Create form-ui-schema file

This file actually creates a UI based form for the user who will fill all the details.

{
    "name": {
        "ui:title": "Name",
        "ui:help": "The name of the Pod"
    },
    "namespace": {
        "ui:title": "Namespace",
        "ui:help": "The target namespace for the Pod",
        "ui:widget": "namespaceSelection"
    },
    "image": {
        "ui:title": "Image",
        "ui:help": "The image name to use for the Pod, for example nginx-ingress:latest"
    }
}

8. After that we need a template.yaml file which we pass in template.json file

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: [forms[0].name ]
[[ forms[0].namespace ? "  namespace: " + forms[0].namespace + "\n" : "" ]]
spec:
  containers:
  - image: [[forms[0].image]]
    name: [[forms[0].name]]
    resources: {}

The final directory structure looks like this:

And we successfully created a K8 Manifest file.

Resources Used:

• YAML Manifest Template in Monokle

• Kunal's youtube video

• Github Repo Link

Thank you note

Thank you for reading the blog.

Keep Learning - keep Growing and don't forget to have fun :)

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