Keel - automated Kubernetes deployments for the rest of us

• Website https://keel.sh
• Slack - kubernetes.slack.com look for channel #keel

Keel is a tool for automating Kubernetes deployment updates. Keel is stateless, robust and lightweight.

Keel provides several key features:

• Kubernetes and Helm providers - Keel has direct integrations with Kubernetes and Helm.

• No CLI/API - tired of f***ctl for everything? Keel doesn't have one. Gets job done through labels, annotations, charts.

• Semver policies - specify update policy for each deployment/Helm release individually.

• Automatic Google Container Registry configuration - Keel automatically sets up topic and subscriptions for your deployment images by periodically scanning your environment.

• Native, DockerHub, Quay and Azure container registry webhooks support - once webhook is received impacted deployments will be identified and updated.

• Polling - when webhooks and pubsub aren't available - Keel can still be useful by checking Docker Registry for new tags (if current tag is semver) or same tag SHA digest change (ie: latest).

• Notifications - out of the box Keel has Slack, Hipchat, Mattermost and standard webhook notifications, more info here

Support

Support Keel's development by:

• Patreon
• Paypal
• Star this repository
• Follow on Twitter

Lightning quick start

Prerequisites:

• Helm
• Kubernetes

You need to add this Chart repo to Helm:

helm repo add keel-charts https://charts.keel.sh 
helm repo update

Install through Helm (with Helm provider enabled by default):

helm upgrade --install keel --namespace=kube-system keel-charts/keel

If you work mostly with regular Kubernetes manifests, you can install Keel without Helm provider support:

helm upgrade --install keel --namespace=keel keel-charts/keel --set helmProvider.enabled="false" 

That's it, see Configuration section now.

Quick Start

A step-by-step guide to install Keel on your Kubernetes cluster is viewable on the Keel website:

https://keel.sh/v1/guide/quick-start.html

Configuration

Once Keel is deployed, you only need to specify update policy on your deployment file or Helm chart:

No additional configuration is required. Enabling continuous delivery for your workloads has never been this easy!

Documentation

Documentation is viewable on the Keel Website:

https://keel.sh/v1/guide/documentation

Contributing

Before starting to work on some big or medium features - raise an issue here so we can coordinate our efforts.

Developing Keel

If you wish to work on Keel itself, you will need Go 1.9+ installed. Make sure you put Keel into correct Gopath and go build (dependency management is done through dep).

To test Keel while developing:

1. Launch a Kubernetes cluster like Minikube or Docker for Mac with Kubernetes.
2. Change config to use it: kubectl config use-context docker-for-desktop
3. Build Keel from cmd/keel directory.
4. Start Keel with: keel --no-incluster. This will use Kubeconfig from your home.

Running unit tests

To run unit tests:

make test

Running e2e tests

Prerequisites:

• configured kubectl + kubeconfig
• a running cluster (test suite will create testing namespaces and delete them after tests)
• Go environment (will compile Keel before running)

Once prerequisites are ready:

make e2e