Documentation

This document describes the Kubeapps architecture at a high level.

At the heart of Kubeapps is an in-cluster Kubernetes dashboard that provides you a simple browse and click experience for installing and managing Kubernetes applications packaged as Helm charts.

The dashboard is written in the JavaScript programming language and is developed using the React JavaScript library.

Please refer to the Kubeapps Dashboard Developer Guide for the developer setup.

The Kubeapps APIs service provides a pluggable, gRPC-based API service enabling the Kubeapps UI (or other clients) to interact with different Kubernetes packaging formats in a consistent, extensible way.

You can read more details about the architecture, implementation and getting started in the Kubeapps APIs developer documentation .

Chart repositories in Kubeapps are managed with a CustomResourceDefinition called apprepositories.kubeapps.com. Each repository added to Kubeapps is an object of type AppRepository and the apprepository-controller will watch for changes on those types of objects to update the list of available charts to deploy.

Please refer to the Kubeapps Apprepository Controller Developer Guide for the developer setup.

The asset-syncer component is a tool that scans a Helm chart repository and populates chart metadata in a database. This metadata is then served by the Helm plugin of the kubeapps-apis component. Check more details about the implementation in this document .

The pinniped-proxy service is an optional component that proxies incoming requests with an Authorization: Bearer token header, exchanging the token via the pinniped aggregate API for x509 short-lived client certificates, before forwarding the request onwards to the destination k8s API server.Check more details about the implementation in this document .

Please refer to the Kubeapps Pinniped Proxy Developer Guide for the developer setup.

The oci-catalog service is an optional component that enables Kubeapps to display a catalog of apps for an OCI registry or a namespace of an OCI registry. The proposed implementation is for a stateless gRPC micro-service that can be run (though is not restricted to run) as a side-car of existing the asset-syncer job to provide lists of repositories for a (namespaced) registry, regardless of the registry provider.

Please refer to the Kubeapps OCI Catalog Developer Guide for the developer setup.