Jx: Configure exposecontroller's urltemplate for preview environments

[mathieusama]

Summary

How can we configure exposecontroller's urltemplate for previews specifically? We’re using a . separator for services in staging/prod (that is OK), but we would really need to use a - separator for preview environments, but cannot figure out how.

For example, this is what we have currently:
http://hello-world.jx-myorg-hello-world-pr-3.mycluster.myorg.com

And this is what we would need:
http://hello-world-jx-myorg-hello-world-pr-3.mycluster.myorg.com

NOTE: That is a big deal for us, because the . separator means that for every new preview a new DNS record must be created and propagated, and a new TLS cert be provisioned, and all that takes so long that the pipeline eventually times out waiting for ingress to become accessible and fails.

For staging+prod, our urltemplate in the exposecontroller ConfigMap is {{.Service}}.{{.Namespace}}.{{.Domain}} and that is fine. However, in the previews’ exposecontroller ConfigMaps, we see no urltemplate property, so we have not a clue how it works for previews.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

• Configure staging/prod environments with a {{.Service}}.{{.Namespace}}.{{.Domain}} urltemplate.
• Create a preview environment via a PR
• Notice that it seems to use same urltemplate for preview (how to use a different one?)

Expected behavior

Use a - separator between service name and namespace in preview url:
http://hello-world-jx-myorg-hello-world-pr-3.mycluster.myorg.com

Actual behavior

It defaults to a . separator, with no obvious way to override it:
http://hello-world.jx-myorg-hello-world-pr-3.mycluster.myorg.com

Jx version

NAME               VERSION
jx                 2.0.1192+cjxd.7
Kubernetes cluster v1.14.9-eks-502bfb
kubectl            v1.16.0
helm client        Client: v2.14.3+g0e7f3b6
git                2.17.1
Operating System   Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS

Jenkins type

• Serverless Jenkins X Pipelines (Tekton + Prow)

Kubernetes cluster

AWS/EKS

eksctl create cluster
--name $CLUSTER
--version 1.14
--region $ZONE
--nodegroup-name standard-workers
--node-type t3.medium
--nodes 3
--nodes-min 3
--nodes-max 3
--managed

Operating system / Environment

ubuntu:bionic

[rawlingsj]

You could try adding

urltemplate: "{{.Service}}-{{.Namespace}}.{{.Domain}}"    

to the exposecontroller configmap in the preview environment, example here https://github.com/jenkins-x-labs/slack/blob/00f61a117c11d06ee23478439fd7b1dff9e37a2a/charts/preview/values.yaml#L6

[mathieusama]

This in the preview values.yaml:

    urltemplate: "{{.Service}}-{{.Namespace}}.{{.Domain}}"

... gets rendered to this in the exposecontroller ConfigMap:

    urltemplate: {{.Service}}-{{.Namespace}}.{{.Domain}}

So the braces are interpreted as a yaml object and exposecontroller fails to load and parse its config.

Any advice @rawlingsj on how to prevent the string from getting unquoted?

[dgozalo]

This might be of help: https://github.com/jenkins-x/jx/issues/6648#issuecomment-597644456, the workaround is for a similar issue for a permanent environment.

Note how he had to use single quotes to interpolate to a valid value.

[mathieusama]

OK, really seems to me like a bug, but I found a hacky workaround, just escaping an extra pair of double-quotes:

    urltemplate: "\"{{.Service}}-{{.Namespace}}.{{.Domain}}\""

But at least that works! :)
Thanks @rawlingsj !

[mathieusama]

Just for the records, that customization of urltemplate was necessary in order to speed up the availability of preview environments and prevent the pipeline from timing out, as I described here https://github.com/jenkins-x/jx/issues/6972

[deanesmith]

Keeping open as a bug

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