helm chart to deploy metacatui on kuberntes

[mbjones]

Describe the feature you'd like

Deploy metacatui to a Kubernetes cluster using helm.

As metacatUI is a simple web app, this mainly needs a mechanism to serve the files from a web server, and provide a config.js file for customization. It might also benefit from the ability to merge in custom themes.

Additional context

• For development purposes, this might simply be a helm chart that deploys nginx with a PVC volume that contains the metacatui src directory
• For production, more care would be needed for customizing the config file, and adding themes that don't by default ship with metacatui.

@artntek is working on a Kubernetes deployment of Metacat in NCEAS/metacat#1623 that also includes a MetacatUI install, but we likely want to install metacatui both standalone and as part of a subchart for flexible deployments.

[mbjones]

Started a simple example for debugging purposes in https://github.com/NCEAS/metacatui/tree/feature-2368-helm-k8s

This works by simply mounting the metacatui/src directory from a PVC in an nginx container where it expects to serve web files. Some simple improvements to make this a bit more useful would be to:

• Create a config.js file that is mounted in the fs by helm on deploy
  • contemplate whether common config options should be settable in values.yaml
• Add ability to include other themes in the deployment

At this point, this proof-of-concept is just meant to start discussion about the direction we should head, and possibly enable developers to more easily deploy metacatui for testing.

[robyngit]

Nice, thanks @mbjones ! If the intention is for development to continue on the feature-2368-helm-k8s branch, then we should change its base to develop rather than main.

[mbjones]

Agreed on develop. I branched it from develop (at the time it was on sha 0447bfd). Still looks that way to me. There is no PR yet as its not close to ready for that.