deploying-on-kubernetes.md

Running Metabase on Kubernetes

This guide will help you install Metabase on Kubernetes using Metabase Helm chart.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.4+ with Beta APIs enabled.
• Helm installed.

How to add the official Metabase Helm repo

$ helm repo add metabase https://www.metabase.com/helm
$ helm repo update

How to run this chart

$ helm install metabase/metabase --generate-name

or, in the case you want to set a custom name (like "meta-helm-chart"):

$ helm install meta-helm-chart metabase/metabase

Introduction

This chart bootstraps a Metabase deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager. The chart sets up liveliness and readiness probes, and separates configuration details between ConfigMaps and Secrets.

This helm chart is highly configurable. For example, you can:

• Connect to any application database.
• Tune the Jetty server.
• Change absolutely every configuration parameter (check out environment variables).

Note that the chart's default deployment will run Metabase with the H2 database, which is strongly discouraged for production environments.

This helm chart pulls the latest docker tag of the metabase/metabase image, but you can configure the chart to pull Metabase Enterprise, or a specific version of our Open Source version.

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the meta-helm-chart deployment simply do:

$ helm delete meta-helm-chart

In the case you used --generate-name flag, you have to know which is the name that helm generated for the deployment by doing helm list and track down the chart with the name that starts with metabase- which will have a random number and then do:

$ helm delete metabase-@@@@@@@@@@

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

Horizontally scaling Metabase

Want to spin up several pods of Metabase? simply do:

$ kubectl scale --replicas=xxx deployments/meta-helm-metabase

in the case you've named meta-helm to your installation. Remember that for horizontally scaling Metabase you'll need to have set up a database for Metabase to persist its state, and an ingress controller that will load balance across all the replicas that you start. Metabase scales both horizontally and vertically, so in case you want to know how to deploy Metabase in production check out our Metabase at Scale guide

Configuration

The following table lists the configurable parameters of the Metabase chart and their default values.

Parameter	Description	Default
replicaCount	desired number of controller pods	1
podAnnotations	controller pods annotations	{}
podLabels	extra pods labels	{}
image.repository	controller container image repository	metabase/metabase
image.tag	controller container image tag	latest
image.pullPolicy	controller container image pull policy	IfNotPresent
fullnameOverride	String to fully override metabase.fullname template	null
config.jetty.host	Listening on a specific network host	0.0.0.0
config.database.type	Backend database type	h2
secrets.config.encryptionKey	Secret key for encrypt sensitive information into database	null
secrets.database.connString	Database connection URI (alternative to the below settings)	null
secrets.database.host	Database host	null
secrets.database.port	Database port	null
secrets.database.dbName	Database name	null
secrets.database.username	Database username	null
secrets.database.password	Database password	null
config.security.passComplexity	Complexity requirement for Metabase account's password	normal
config.security.passLength	Minimum length required for Metabase account's password	6
livenessProbe.initialDelaySeconds	Delay before liveness probe is initiated	120
livenessProbe.timeoutSeconds	When the probe times out	30
livenessProbe.failureThreshold	Minimum consecutive failures for the probe	6
readinessProbe.initialDelaySeconds	Delay before readiness probe is initiated	30
readinessProbe.timeoutSeconds	When the probe times out	3
readinessProbe.periodSeconds	How often to perform the probe	5
service.type	ClusterIP, NodePort, or LoadBalancer	ClusterIP
service.loadBalancerSourceRanges	Array of Source Ranges	null
service.externalPort	Service external port	80
service.internalPort	Service internal port, should be the same as listen.port	3000
service.nodePort	Service node port	null
service.annotations	Service annotations	{}
ingress.enabled	Enable ingress controller resource	false
ingress.hosts	Ingress resource hostnames	null
ingress.path	Ingress path	/
ingress.labels	Ingress labels configuration	null
ingress.annotations	Ingress annotations configuration	{}
ingress.tls	Ingress TLS configuration	null
resources	Server resource requests and limits	{}
nodeSelector	Node labels for pod assignment	{}
tolerations	Toleration labels for pod assignment	[]
affinity	Affinity settings for pod assignment	{}
initContainers	Init containers to add to the pod	[]
extraVolumes	Extra volumes for the pod	[]
extraVolumeMounts	Extra volume mounts for the metabase container	[]
config.jetty.maxThreads	Jetty max number of threads	50
config.jetty.minThreads	Jetty min number of threads	8
config.dw.maxConnectionPoolSize	Maximum number of connections to a data warehouse	15

The above parameters map to the environment variables. As this Helm Chart can tweak every parameter of a Metabase installation, please check out in the documentation the default values of each one and change accordingly. You can also see all the parameters that can be changed in the source of this helm chart

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example:

$ helm install meta-helm-chart \
  --set image.tag=v0.41.0,config.security.passComplexity=strong,config.security.passlength=10 \
    metabase/metabase

The above command starts Metabase on version 0.41.0, and sets the user password complexity to strong, with a minimum length of 10.

Alternatively, you can provide a YAML file that specifies the values for the parameters. For example:

$ helm install meta-helm-chart -f values.yaml metabase/metabase

Want to run Metabase Enterprise? Run:

$ helm install meta-helm-chart \
  --set image.tag=v1.41.0,image.repository=metabase/metabase-enterprise \
    metabase/metabase

Adding extra volumes

To add extra volumes, you can use the extraVolumes and extraVolumeMounts parameters.

For example, to add Metabase plugins stored on a persistent volume you could provide the following in your values.yaml:

extraVolumeMounts:
  - name: metabase-plugins
    mountPath: /app/plugins

extraVolumes:
  - name: metabase-plugins
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: pv-metabase-plugins

Adding init containers

To add init containers to the Metabase pod, you can use the initContainers parameter.

For example, to add an init container that sleeps until the database is ready, you could provide the following in your values.yaml:

initContainers:
  - name: init-mydb
    image: busybox:1.28
    command: [
      'sh',
      '-c',
      "until nslookup mydb.$(cat /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace).svc.cluster.local; do echo waiting for mydb; sleep 2; done"
    ]