octant-plugin-crd-example

octant-plugin-crd-example

This project is an example of building dashboards for CRDs using octant plugins. The CRDs are generated using kubebuilder tools with some controller-manager code to optionally write controllers for the CRDs. Directory plugin/ contains two plugin packages for creating a user and an admin dashboard for the CRDs.

The user plugin and the admin plugin provide different set of controls in the octant dashboard. The user plugin is supposed to be used by a restricted user for viewing and updating limited options. The admin plugin is supposed to be used by high privilege users who can modify all the resources. Shortcuts and power user controls can be provided in the admin plugin for various administrative tasks.

Setup/Development

1. Install the CRDs in a cluster with make install.
2. Download and install octant.
3. Build the octant plugins with make build-plugins.
4. Install the octant plugins with make install-plugins.
5. Run octant. It should start and register the two plugins.

The example CRDs in this project are Boxes and BoxRecords. The example configurations refer to a namespace called box. Create the namespace box and install the sample instances of these CRDs with kubectl apply -k config/samples/.

In the octant dashboard, opening the CRD instances should show extra tabs and cards, created by the plugins.

From the left navigation bar, icons for the user and/or admin plugin can be used to open the respective dashboards.

When developing, to rebuild and install the plugins run make build-install-plugins. If octant is already using the old binaries, the installation will fail with Text file busy error. Stop octant before installing a new version of the plugin.

Refer https://reference.octant.dev/ for docs and examples of octant's UI components.

Restricted User

NOTE: Remove the admin plugin binary from ~/.config/octant/plugins/ before trying as a restricted user to avoid seeing the admin plugin options.

To try a restricted user experience, create a service account and roles for a restricted user with kubectl apply -k plugin/octant-box-user/config/. This creates Role, ClusterRoles, RoleBinding, ClusterRoleBinding and a ServiceAccount, in the box namespace with read only access for octant. Run bash hack/user-kubeconfig-gen.sh to generate a restricted kubeconfig (box-user.kubeconfig) using the created ServiceAccount. Run octant with the created kubeconfig:

$ octant --kubeconfig box-user.kubeconfig

This should open the octant dashboard with access to the box namespace only.