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a well-cared for log is a beautiful and useful thing

Reviewing others’ commits and pull requests becomes something worth doing, and suddenly can be done independently.

Understanding why something happened months or years ago becomes not only possible but efficient.

how to write an individual commit message.

What should it not contain?

issue tracking IDs

pull request numbers

Use the body to explain what and why vs. how

Use the imperative mood in the subject line

it’s a good idea to begin the commit message with a single short (less than 50 character) line summarizing the change, followed by a blank line and then a more thorough description.

forces the author to think for a moment about the most concise way to explain what’s going on.

shoot for 50 characters, but consider 72 the hard limit

Imperative mood just means “spoken or written as if giving a command or instruction”.

Git itself uses the imperative whenever it creates a commit on your behalf.

when you write your commit messages in the imperative, you’re following Git’s own built-in conventions.

A properly formed Git commit subject line should always be able to complete the following sentence: If applied, this commit will your subject line here

explaining what changed and why

Code is generally self-explanatory in this regard (and if the code is so complex that it needs to be explained in prose, that’s what source comments are for).

there are tab completion scripts that take much of the pain out of remembering the subcommands and switches.

deployment.yaml: A basic manifest for creating a Kubernetes deployment

using the suffix .yaml for YAML files and .tpl for helpers.

helm get manifest

The helm get manifest command takes a release name (full-coral) and prints out all of the Kubernetes resources that were uploaded to the server. Each file begins with --- to indicate the start of a YAML document

Names should be unique to a release

The name: field is limited to 63 characters because of limitations to the DNS system.

release names are limited to 53 characters

{{ .Release.Name }}

The values that are passed into a template can be thought of as namespaced objects, where a dot (.) separates each namespaced element.

The Release object is one of the built-in objects for Helm

Using --dry-run will make it easier to test your code, but it won’t ensure that Kubernetes itself will accept the templates you generate.

Objects are passed into a template from the template engine.

create new objects within your templates

Objects can be simple, and have just one value. Or they can contain other objects or functions.

Release is one of the top-level objects that you can access in your templates.

Release.Namespace: The namespace to be released into (if the manifest doesn’t override)

Chart: The contents of the Chart.yaml file.

Files: This provides access to all non-special files in a chart.

Files.Get is a function for getting a file by name

Files.GetBytes is a function for getting the contents of a file as an array of bytes instead of as a string. This is useful for things like images.

Template: Contains information about the current template that is being executed

BasePath: The namespaced path to the templates directory of the current chart

Go’s naming convention

use only initial lower case letters in order to distinguish local names from those built-in.

If this is a subchart, the values.yaml file of a parent chart

Individual parameters passed with --set

While structuring data this way is possible, the recommendation is that you keep your values trees shallow, favoring flatness.

If you need to delete a key from the default values, you may override the value of the key to be null, in which case Helm will remove the key from the overridden values merge.

Kubernetes would then fail because you can not declare more than one livenessProbe handler.

When injecting strings from the .Values object into the template, we ought to quote these strings.

quote

Template functions follow the syntax functionName arg1 arg2...

While we talk about the “Helm template language” as if it is Helm-specific, it is actually a combination of the Go template language, some extra functions, and a variety of wrappers to expose certain objects to the templates.

Drawing on a concept from UNIX, pipelines are a tool for chaining together a series of template commands to compactly express a series of transformations.

pipelines are an efficient way of getting several things done in sequence

The repeat function will echo the given string the given number of times

default DEFAULT_VALUE GIVEN_VALUE. This function allows you to specify a default value inside of the template, in case the value is omitted.

all static default values should live in the values.yaml, and should not be repeated using the default command

Operators are implemented as functions that return a boolean value.

To use eq, ne, lt, gt, and, or, not etcetera place the operator at the front of the statement followed by its parameters just as you would a function.

if and

if or

with to specify a scope

range, which provides a “for each”-style loop

block declares a special kind of fillable template area

A pipeline is evaluated as false if the value is: a boolean false a numeric zero an empty string a nil (empty or null) an empty collection (map, slice, tuple, dict, array)

incorrect YAML because of the whitespacing

When the template engine runs, it removes the contents inside of {{ and }}, but it leaves the remaining whitespace exactly as is.

{{- (with the dash and space added) indicates that whitespace should be chomped left, while -}} means whitespace to the right should be consumed.

Newlines are whitespace!

an * at the end of the line indicates a newline character that would be removed

the indent function

Scopes can be changed. with can allow you to set the current scope (.) to a particular object.

range

The range function will “range over” (iterate through) the pizzaToppings list.

Just like with sets the scope of ., so does a range operator.

The toppings: |- line is declaring a multi-line string.

not a YAML list. It’s a big string.

the data in ConfigMaps data is composed of key/value pairs, where both the key and the value are simple strings.

The |- marker in YAML takes a multi-line string.

range can be used to iterate over collections that have a key and a value (like a map or dict).

In Helm templates, a variable is a named reference to another object. It follows the form $name

Variables are assigned with a special assignment operator: :=

{{- $relname := .Release.Name -}}

capture both the index and the value

the integer index (starting from zero) to $index and the value to $topping

For data structures that have both a key and a value, we can use range to get both

one variable that is always global - $ - this variable will always point to the root context.

$.

$.

Helm template language is its ability to declare multiple templates and use them together.

A named template (sometimes called a partial or a subtemplate) is simply a template defined inside of a file, and given a name.

If you declare two templates with the same name, whichever one is loaded last will be the one used.

naming convention is to prefix each defined template with the name of the chart: {{ define "mychart.labels" }}