Tyk Helm Chart

Introduction

This is the preferred (and easiest) way to install Tyk Self-Managed on Kubernetes. It will install full Tyk platform with Tyk manager, Tyk gateways and Tyk pumps into your Kubernetes cluster where you can add and manage APIs via the Tyk Operator, and the Tyk manager (i.e Tyk dashboard).

Prerequisites

1. Tyk License

If you are evaluating Tyk on Kubernetes, contact us to obtain a temporary licence.

2. Data stores

The following are required for a Tyk Self-managed installation:

• Redis - Should be installed in the cluster or reachable from inside the cluster (for SaaS option). You can find instructions for a simple Redis installation bellow.
• MongoDB - Should be installed in the cluster or be reachable by the Tyk Manager (for SaaS option).

Installation instructions for Redis and MongoDB are detailed below.

Installation

As well as our official Helm repo, you can also find it in ArtifactHub.

If you are interested in contributing to our charts, suggesting changes, creating PRs or any other way, please use GitHub Tyk-helm-chart repo or contact us in Tyk Community forum or through our sales team.

Add the Tyk official Helm repo

helm repo add tyk-helm https://helm.tyk.io/public/helm/charts/
helm repo update

Create namespace for tyk deployment

kubectl create namespace tyk

Getting the values.yaml of the chart

Before we proceed with installation of the chart you need to set some custom values. To see what options are configurable on a chart and save that options to a custom values.yaml file run:

helm show values tyk-helm/tyk-pro > values.yaml

Installing the data stores

For Redis and MongoDB you can use these rather excellent charts provided by Bitnami

Redis

helm install tyk-redis bitnami/redis -n tyk

Follow the notes from the installation output to get connection details and password.

  Redis(TM) can be accessed on the following DNS names from within your cluster:

    tyk-redis-master.tyk.svc.cluster.local for read/write operations (port 6379)
    tyk-redis-replicas.tyk.svc.cluster.local for read-only operations (port 6379)

  export REDIS_PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secret --namespace tyk tyk-redis -o jsonpath="{.data.redis-password}" | base64 --decode)

The DNS name of your Redis as set by Bitnami is tyk-redis-master.tyk.svc.cluster.local:6379 (Tyk needs the name including the port) You can update them in your local values.yaml file under redis.addrs and redis.pass Alternatively, you can use --set flag to set it in Tyk installation. For example --set redis.pass=$REDIS_PASSWORD

MongoDB

helm install tyk-mongo bitnami/mongodb --set "replicaSet.enabled=true" -n tyk

Follow the notes from the installation output to get connection details and password. The DNS name of your MongoDB as set with Bitnami is tyk-mongo-mongodb.tyk.svc.cluster.local and you also need to set the authSource parameter to admin. The full mongoURL should be similar to mongoURL: mongodb://root:[email protected]:27017/tyk_analytics?authSource=admin. You can update them in your local values.yaml file under mongo.mongoURL Alternatively, you can use --set flag to set it in your Tyk installation.

Quick Redis and MongoDB PoC installation

helm install redis tyk-helm/simple-redis -n tyk
helm install mongo tyk-helm/simple-mongodb -n tyk

License setting

For Tyk Self-managed chart we need to set the license key in your custom values.yaml file under dash.license field or use --set dash.license={YOUR-LICENSE_KEY} with the helm install command.

Tyk Self-managed licensing allow for different numbers of Gateway nodes to connect to a single Dashboard instance. To ensure that your Gateway pods will not scale beyond your license allowance, change the Gateway’s resource kind from DaemonSet to Deployment and the replica count to your license node limit. For example, use the following options for a single node license: --set gateway.kind=Deployment --set gateway.replicaCount=1 in your values.yaml file or in the Helm install command.

Installing Tyk Self managed

Now we can install the chart using our custom values:

helm install tyk-pro tyk-helm/tyk-pro -f ./values.yaml -n tyk --wait

Tyk Developer Portal

You can disable the bootstrapping of the Developer Portal by the portal.bootstrap: false in your local values.yaml file.

Using TLS

You can turn on the TLS option under the gateway section in your local values.yaml file which will make your Gateway listen on port 443 and load up a dummy certificate. You can set your own default certificate by replacing the file in the certs/ folder.

Mounting Files

To mount files to any of the Tyk stack components, add the following to the mounts array in the section of that component. For example:

- name: aws-mongo-ssl-cert
 filename: rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem
 mountPath: /etc/certs

Sharding APIs

Sharding is the ability for you to decide which of your APIs are loaded on which of your Tyk Gateways. This option is turned off by default, however, you can turn it on by updating the gateway.sharding.enabled option. Once you do that you will also need to set the gateway.sharding.tags field with the tags that you want that particular Gateway to load. (ex. tags: “external,ingress”.) You can then add those tags to your APIs in the API Designer, under the Advanced Options tab, and the Segment Tags (Node Segmentation) section in your Tyk Dashboard. Check Tyk Gateway Sharding for more details.

Other Tyk Components

Installing Tyk Self-managed Control Plane

If you are deploying the Tyk Control plane, a.k.a MDCB, for a Tyk Multi data Centre deployment then you set the mdcb.enabled: true option in the local values.yaml to add of the MDCB component to your installation. Check Tyk Control plane for more configuration details.

This setting enables multi-cluster, multi Data-Centre API management from a single dashboard.

Tyk Identity Broker (TIB)

The Tyk Identity Broker (TIB) is a micro-service portal that provides a bridge between various Identity Management Systems such as LDAP, OpenID Connect providers and legacy Basic Authentication providers, to your Tyk installation. See TIB for more details.

For SSO to Tyk Manager and Tyk developer portal purposes you do not need to install TIB, as its functionality is now part of the Tyk Manager. However, if you want to run it separately (as you used to before this merge) or if you need it as a broker for the Tyk gateway you can do so.

Once you have installed Tyk Gateway and Tyk Manager, you can configure TIB by adding its configuration environment variables under the tib.extraEnvs section and updating the profile.json in your configs folder. See our TIB GitHub repo. Once you complete your modifications you can run the following command from the root of the repository to update your helm chart.

helm upgrade tyk-pro values.yaml -n tyk

This chart implies there’s a ConfigMap with a profiles.json definition in it. Please use tib.configMap.profiles value to set the name of this ConfigMap (tyk-tib-profiles-conf by default).

Tyk as an Ingress using Tyk operator

To set up an ingress for your Tyk Gateways see our Tyk Operator GitHub repository.

Istio Service Mesh with Tyk as an Ingress

To use Tyk’s gateways as the ingress to your Istio Service Mesh simply change gateway.enableIstioIngress: true in the values.yaml. Ensure you are using an Istio manifest which disables the default Istio Ingress gateway.

Next Steps Tutorials

Follow the Tutorials on the Self Managed tabs for the following:

1. Add an API
2. Create a Security Policy
3. Create an API Key