Install

Use Helm to customize your setup of Gloo Gateway in a single cluster.

In a single-cluster setup, you install the Gloo Gateway control plane and gateway proxy together, as shown in the following diagram.

• Gloo Gateway control plane: When you install the Gloo Gateway control plane, a deployment named gloo-mesh-mgmt-server is created to translate and implement your Gloo configurations. Because you include the glooAgent.enabled: true setting in the installation values file, the cluster is also registered to be managed by Gloo. A deployment named gloo-mesh-agent is created to run the Gloo agent as part of the Gloo Gateway data plane.
• Gateway proxy: Use the Gloo Gateway control plane to install an ingress gateway proxy in your cluster, as part of the Istio lifecycle management. By using a Gloo-managed installation, you no longer need to manually install and manage the istiod control plane and gateway proxy. Instead, you provide the Istio configuration in your gloo-platform Helm chart, and Gloo translates this configuration into a managed istiod control plane and gateway proxy in the cluster.

Before you begin

1. Create or use an existing Kubernetes cluster, and save the name of the cluster as an environment variable. Note: The cluster name must be alphanumeric with no special characters except a hyphen (-), lowercase, and begin with a letter (not a number).

   export CLUSTER_NAME=<cluster_name>
   

2. Set your Gloo Gateway license key as an environment variable. If you do not have one, contact an account representative. If you prefer to specify license keys in a secret instead, see Licensing.

   export GLOO_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY=<gloo-gateway-license-key>
   

   To check your license's validity, you can run meshctl license check --key $(echo ${GLOO_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY} | base64 -w0).

3. Set the Gloo Gateway version as an environment variable. The latest version is used as an example. You can find other versions in the Changelog documentation. Append ‘-fips’ for a FIPS-compliant image, such as ‘2.3.22-fips’. Do not include v before the version number.

   export GLOO_VERSION=2.3.22
   

4. Install the following CLI tools:

   • helm, the Kubernetes package manager.
   • meshctl, the Gloo command line tool for bootstrapping Gloo Platform, registering clusters, describing configured resources, and more. Be sure to download version 2.3.22, which uses the latest Gloo Gateway CRDs.
   • kubectl, the Kubernetes command line tool. Download the kubectl version that is within one minor version of the Kubernetes cluster you plan to use.

5. Production installations: Review Best practices for production to prepare your security measures. For example, before you begin your Gloo installation, you can provide your own certificates and set up secure access to the Gloo UI.

Install Gloo Gateway with Helm

Customize your Gloo setup by installing with the Gloo Platform Helm chart.

1. Add and update the Helm repository for Gloo Platform.

   helm repo add gloo-platform https://storage.googleapis.com/gloo-platform/helm-charts
   helm repo update
   

2. Apply the Gloo Platform CRDs to your cluster by creating a gloo-platform-crds Helm release. Note: If you plan to manually deploy and manage your Istio installation in workload clusters rather than using the Gloo Istio lifecycle manager, include the --set installIstioOperator=false flag to ensure that the Istio operator CRD is not managed by this Gloo CRD Helm release.

   helm install gloo-platform-crds gloo-platform/gloo-platform-crds \
      --namespace=gloo-mesh \
      --create-namespace \
      --version $GLOO_VERSION
   

3. Prepare a Helm values file for production-level settings, including FIPS-compliant images, OIDC authorization for the Gloo UI, and more. To get started, you can use the minimum settings in the gloo-gateway-single profile as a basis for your values file. This profile enables all of the necessary components that are required for a single-cluster Gloo Gateway installation, such as the management server, agent, and gateway proxy, as well as some optional components, such as the Gloo UI.

   curl https://storage.googleapis.com/gloo-platform/helm-profiles/$GLOO_VERSION/gloo-gateway-single.yaml > gloo-gateway-single.yaml
   open gloo-gateway-single.yaml
   

4. Edit the file to provide your own details for settings that are recommended for production deployments, such as the following optional settings.

   Field	Decription
   glooMgmtServer.resources.limits	Add resource limits for the gloo-mesh-mgmt-server pod, such as cpu: 1000m and memory: 1Gi.
   glooMgmtServer.serviceOverrides.metadata.annotations	Add annotations for the management server load balancer as needed, such as AWS-specific load balancer annotations. For more information, see Deployment and service overrides.
   glooUi.auth	Set up OIDC authorization for the Gloo UI. For more information, see UI authentication.
   istioInstallations	The default supported version of Istio is used to install the managed gateway proxies. You can instead choose the Istio version you want to use for your gateway proxy. For an example of how this section might look, expand “Example: istioInstallations section” after this table. NOTE: To manage the gateway proxies yourself instead of the gateway lifecycle manager in this Helm chart, set istioInstallations.enabled to false, and manually deploy gateway proxies.
   prometheus.enabled	Disable the default Prometheus instance as needed to provide your own. Otherwise, you can keep the default Prometheus server enabled, and deploy a production-level server to scrape metrics from the server. For more information on each option, see Best practices for collecting metrics in production.
   redis	Disable the default Redis deployment and provide your own backing database as needed. For more information, see Backing databases.

   Example: istioInstallations section

   Your istioInstallations section might look like the following.

   • hub: Specify a Gloo Istio repo key that you can get by logging in to the Support Center and reviewing the Istio images built by Solo.io support article. For more information, see Get the Gloo Istio version that you want to use.
   • tag: Specify the version that you downloaded and append the solo tag, which is required to use many enterprise features, such as 1.18.2-solo. You can append other Gloo Istio tags, as described in About Gloo Istio. Note: The Istio lifecycle manager is supported only for Istio versions 1.15.4 or later.
   • revision and gatewayRevision: Take the Istio major and minor version numbers and replace the period with a hyphen, such as 1-18-2.

   istioInstallations:
     controlPlane:
       enabled: true
       installations:
         - istioOperatorSpec:
             hub: $repo_key
             tag: 1.18.2-solo
           revision: 1-18-2
     enabled: true
     northSouthGateways:
       - enabled: true
         installations:
           - gatewayRevision: 1-18-2
             istioOperatorSpec:
               hub: $repo_key
               tag: 1.18.2-solo
         name: istio-ingressgateway
   

   For more information about the settings you can configure:

   • See Best practices for production.
   • See all possible fields for the Helm chart by running helm show values gloo-platform/gloo-platform --version v2.3.22 > all-values.yaml. You can also see these fields in the Helm values documentation.

5. Install the Gloo Gateway control plane and data plane components in your cluster, including the customizations in your Helm values file.

   helm install gloo-platform gloo-platform/gloo-platform \
      --namespace gloo-mesh \
      --version $GLOO_VERSION \
      --values gloo-gateway-single.yaml \
      --set common.cluster=$CLUSTER_NAME \
      --set licensing.glooGatewayLicenseKey=$GLOO_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY
   

6. Optional: Install add-ons, such as the external auth and rate limit servers, in a separate Helm release. Only create this release if you did not enable the extAuthService and rateLimiter in your main installation release.

   Want to expose your APIs through a developer portal? You must include some extra Helm settings. To install, see Portal.

   export ISTIO_REVISION=1-18
   kubectl create namespace gloo-mesh-addons
   kubectl label namespace gloo-mesh-addons istio.io/rev="${ISTIO_REVISION}" --overwrite
   helm install gloo-agent-addons gloo-platform/gloo-platform \
      --namespace gloo-mesh-addons \
      --create-namespace \
      --version $GLOO_VERSION \
      --set common.cluster=$CLUSTER_NAME \
      --set extAuthService.enabled=true \
      --set rateLimiter.enabled=true
   

Verify the installation

Ensure that Gloo Gateway is successfully installed to your cluster.

1. Verify that Gloo Gateway is correctly installed. This check might take a few seconds to verify that:

   • Your Gloo Platform product licenses are valid and current.
   • The Gloo Platform CRDs are installed at the correct version.
   • The Gloo Gateway pods are running and healthy.
   • The Gloo agent is running and connected to the management server.

   meshctl check
   

   Example output:

   🟢 License status
   
    INFO  gloo-gateway enterprise license expiration is 25 Aug 24 10:38 CDT
    INFO  Valid GraphQL license module found
   
   🟢 CRD version check
   
   🟢 Gloo deployment status
   
   Namespace        | Name                           | Ready | Status 
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-agent                | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-mgmt-server          | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-redis                | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-mesh-ui                   | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-telemetry-gateway         | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | prometheus-server              | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh-addons | ext-auth-service               | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh-addons | rate-limiter                   | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh-addons | redis                          | 1/1   | Healthy
   gloo-mesh        | gloo-telemetry-collector-agent | 3/3   | Healthy
   
   
   🟢 Mgmt server connectivity to workload agents
   
   Cluster  | Registered | Connected Pod                                   
   cluster1 | true       | gloo-mesh/gloo-mesh-mgmt-server-65bd557b95-v8qq6
   

2. Verify that the gateway proxy service is created and assigned an external IP address. It might take a few minutes for the load balancer to deploy.

   kubectl get svc -n gloo-mesh-gateways
   

   Example output:

   NAME                            TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)                                                      AGE
   istio-ingressgateway            LoadBalancer   10.XX.X.XXX    34.XXX.XXX.XXX   15021:30826/TCP,80:31257/TCP,443:30673/TCP,15443:30789/TCP   48s
   

3. Optional: Check out the workspace and workspace settings that were created for you. Workspaces help to organize team resources in your cluster, and to isolate Kubernetes and Gloo Gateway resources. Because the default workspace is used for demonstration purposes, it does not isolate any resources, and instead allows all Kubernetes and Gloo Gateway resources in the workspace.

   kubectl get workspace $CLUSTER_NAME -n gloo-mesh -o yaml
   

   kubectl get workspacesettings default -n gloo-mesh -o yaml
   

   If you want to learn more about how to configure workspaces to isolate Kubernetes and Gloo Gateway resources for multiple teams, see the Multitenancy concepts page and the Organize team resources with workspaces guide.

Next steps

Now that Gloo Gateway is installed, check out the following resources to explore Gloo Gateway capabilities:

• Organize team resources with workspaces.
• Deploy sample apps in your cluster to follow the guides in the documentation.
• Configure HTTP or HTTPS listeners for your gateway.
• Review routing examples, such as header matching, redirects, or direct responses that you can configure for your API Gateway.
• Explore traffic policies that you can apply to your routes and upstream services.
• Learn more about Gloo Gateway and its features in Concepts.