Configuring Gaffer with Helm

Warning

Gaffer Kubernetes is not currently up to date. You will need to use a version of Kubernetes <= 1.25 for deployments. The information here is subject to change in future releases.

The general overview of what you can configure in a Gaffer graph is outlined under the configuring Gaffer pages. However, under a Helm based Kubernetes deployment the configuration needs to be applied slightly differently, this page captures how you can currently configure a Gaffer deployment using Helm.

Tip

Use the --reuse-values argument on a Helm upgrade to re-use passwords from the initial construction.

Graph Metadata

Create a file called graph-meta.yaml. We will use this file to add our description and graph ID. Changing the description is as easy as changing the graph.config.description value.

graph:
  config:
    description: "My graph description"

Upgrade your deployment using Helm to load the new file:

helm upgrade my-graph gaffer-docker/gaffer -f graph-metadata.yaml --reuse-values

Graph ID

Updating the ID may be simple or complicated depending on your store type. If you are using a Map or Federated store, you can just set the graph.config.graphId value like with the graph description. Though if you are using a Map Store, the graph will be emptied as a result.

To safely update the Graph ID of an Accumulo instance you must change the gaffer users permissions to read and write to that table. To do that update the graph-meta.yaml file with the following contents:

graph:
    config:
    graphId: "MyGraph"
    description: "My Graph description"

accumulo:
    config:
    userManagement:
        users:
        gaffer:
            permissions:
            table:
                MyGraph:
                - READ
                - WRITE
                - BULK_IMPORT
                - ALTER_TABLE

Loading new Graph Schema

The easiest way to deploy a schema file is to use helms --set-file option which lets you set a value from the contents of a file. For a Helm deployment to pick up changes to a Schema, you need to run a helm upgrade:

helm upgrade my-graph gaffer-docker/gaffer --set-file graph.schema."schema\.json"=./schema.json --reuse-values

Change Accumulo Passwords

When deploying the Accumulo Helm chart, the following values are set. If you are using the Gaffer Helm chart with the Accumulo integration, the values will be prefixed with "accumulo":

Name	value	default value
Instance Secret	config.accumuloSite."instance.secret"	"DEFAULT"
Root password	config.userManagement.rootPassword	"root"
Tracer user password	config.userManagement.users.tracer.password	"tracer"

When you deploy the Gaffer Helm chart with Accumulo, a "gaffer" user with a password of "gaffer" is used by default following the same pattern as the tracer user.

So to install a new Gaffer with Accumulo store, create an accumulo-passwords.yaml with the following contents:

accumulo:
  enabled: true
  config:
    accumuloSite:
      instance.secret: "changeme"
    userManagement:
      rootPassword: "changeme"
      users:
        tracer:
          password: "changme"
        gaffer:
          password: "changeme"

You can install the graph with:

helm install my-graph gaffer-docker/gaffer -f accumulo-passwords.yaml