Installing Parse Server on IBM Cloud

This document will describe how to install Parse Server on IBM Cloud using Kubernetes services.

Step 1 — Provision Kubernetes Cluster

• Click the Catalog button on the top
• Select Service from the Catalog
• Search for Kubernetes Service and click on it

• You are now at the Kubernetes deployment page. You need to specify some information about the cluster.
• Choose either of the following plans; standard or free. The free plan only has one worker node and no subnet. To provision a standard cluster. You will need to upgrade your account to Pay-As-You-Go
• To upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go account, complete the following steps:
• In the console, go to Manage > Account.
• Select Account settings and click Add credit card.
• Enter your payment information, click Next, and submit your information
• Choose classic or VPC , read the docs and choose the most suitable type for yourself
• Now choose your location settings,
• Choose Geography (continent)

• Choose Single or Multizone.

In single zone, your data is only kept on the datacenter while on the other hand with Multizone, it is distributed to multiple zones, thus safer in an unforeseen zone failure

If you wish to use Multizone, please set up your account with VRF

• If at your current location selection, there is no available Virtual LAN, a new VLAN will be created for you
• Choose a Worker node setup or use the preselected one. Set Worker node amount per zone
• Choose Master Service Endpoint.

In VRF-enabled accounts, you can choose private-only to make your master accessible on the private network or via VPN tunnel. Choose public-only to make your master publicly accessible. When you have a VRF-enabled account, your cluster is set up by default to use both private and public endpoints.

• Give desired tags to your cluster
• Click create
• Wait for your cluster to be provisioned
• Your cluster is ready for usage

Step 2 — Deploy IBM Cloud Block Storage plug-in

The Block Storage plug-in is a persistent, high-performance iSCSI storage that you can add to your apps by using Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs).

• Click the Catalog button on the top
• Select Software from the catalog
• Search for IBM Cloud Block Storage plug-in and click on it
• On the application page, click on the dot next to the cluster you wish to use
• Click on Enter or Select Namespace and choose the default Namespace or use a custom one (if you get an error please wait 30 minutes for the cluster to finalize)
• Give a name to this workspace
• Click install and wait for the deployment

Step 3 — Installing Parse Server

Helm Charts to deploy Parse Server in Kubernetes

$ helm repo add bitnami-ibm https://charts.bitnami.com/ibm
$ helm install my-release bitnami-ibm/parse

Parameters

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

Global Parameters

Deploy your Cloud functions with Parse Cloud Code

The Bitnami Parse image allows you to deploy your Cloud functions with Parse Cloud Code (a feature that allows running a piece of code in your Parse Server instead of the user’s mobile devices).

To add your custom scripts, they must be located inside the chart folder files/cloud so they can be used as a ConfigMap.

Alternatively, you can specify custom scripts using the cloudCodeScripts parameter as dict.

In addition to these options, you can also set an external ConfigMap with all the Cloud Code scripts. This is done by setting the existingCloudCodeScriptsCM parameter.

Note that this will override the two previous options.

Adding extra environment variables

In case you want to add extra environment variables (useful for advanced operations like custom init scripts), you can use the extraEnvVars (available in the server and dashboard sections) property.

extraEnvVars:
    name: PARSE_SERVER_ALLOW_CLIENT_CLASS_CREATION
    value: true

Alternatively, you can use a ConfigMap or a Secret with the environment variables. To do so, use the extraEnvVarsCM or the extraEnvVarsSecret values.

Deploying Extra Resources

There are cases where you may want to deploy extra objects, such as KongPlugins, KongConsumers, amongst others. For this case, the chart allows adding the full specification of other objects using the extraDeploy parameter.

The following example would activate a plugin at deployment time.

Extra objects to deploy (value evaluated as a template)

extraDeploy: |-
 - apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
name: {{ include "common.names.fullname" . }}-privileged
namespace: {{ .Release.Namespace }}
labels: {{- include "common.labels.standard" . | nindent 6 }}
roleRef:
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
kind: ClusterRole
name: cluster-admin
subjects:
\- kind: ServiceAccount
   name: default
   namespace: {{ .Release.Namespace }}

Both container images and chart can be upgraded by running the command below:

$ helm upgrade my-release bitnami-ibm/parse

If you use a previous container image (previous to 3.1.2-r14 for Parse or 1.2.0-r69 for Parse Dashboard), disable the securityContext by running the command below:

$ helm upgrade my-release bitnami-ibm/parse --set server.securityContext.enabled=false,das

The installation is done. Enjoy!