Deploying Veramo on Azure using Terraform and Helm (Part 2): ): A Step-by-Step guide for deploying a DID and Verifiable Credentials framework

Deploying Veramo agent into AKS using helm

5 min readFeb 28, 2024

In this article we will learn how to deploy Veramo Agent to Azure Kubernetes Service using Helm. It assumes that you have already created the necessary infrastructure on Azure. If not, you can follow part 1 of this article to do so.

Prerequisites

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Azure Container Registry (ACR)
Helm
Git
Docker
Azure cli (az)

Create a Docker image for Veramo Agent and push to ACR

Open a terminal on your local machine and clone veramo-agent-deploy repository from Github:

git clone https://github.com/uport-project/veramo-agent-deploy.git

Change to the veramo-agent-deploy repository and run the following commands to create a Docker image in your container registry.

cd veramo-agent-deploy

docker login <myregistry.azurecr.io>

If everything was configured correctly you should see an output as follows:

We are now ready to build and push the image to our ACR.

However, during our build process we encountered a problem that the agent-explore is incompatible with the node 19 i.e. the node version given in the Docker file.

There is a pull request that on Veramo-agent-deploy GitHub that should fix this issue, until this pull request is merged, the fastest work around is to downgrade the node version given in the Docker file to node:18. Your new Docker file should read as follows:

FROM node:18
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY package.json .
COPY yarn.lock .
ADD config config
RUN yarn install --production
CMD ["yarn", "start"]
EXPOSE 3332

Once logged into your ACR using the docker login command you can build the image using:

docker build -t veramoregistry.azurecr.io/veramo-agent .

This command should produce an output as follows:

We are now ready to push our image into azure container registry (ACR).

You can do so by running the following command in your terminal:

docker push veramoregistry.azurecr.io/veramo-agent:latest

You should see the following output:

Helm Chart for Veramo Agent

Inside veramo-agent-deploy directory create a new folder titledhelm

mkdir helm

Create the following files in the helm folder:

1 — chart.yaml

apiVersion: v2
name: veramoAgent
description: A Helm chart for Kubernetes

type: application


version: 0.1.0


appVersion: '1.16.0'

2 — values.yaml

appName: vcagent
port: 3332

namespace: default

configmap:
  name: veramo-configmap-v1.0
  data:
    customHeader: 'This app was deployed with helm!'

configmapName: veramoAgentConfigMapV1.1

replicaCount: 1

image:
  name: veramoregistry.azurecr.io/veramo-agent
  tag: latest

3 — values-dev.yaml

namespace: default

configmap:
  data:
    CUSTOM_HEADER: 'This is on the DEV environment!'

replicaCount: 1

4 — templates/configmap.yaml

Please replace the values in <> with specific values from your environment

kind: ConfigMap 
apiVersion: v1 
metadata:
  name: {{ .Values.configmap.name }}
  namespace: {{ .Values.namespace }}
data:
  SECRET_KEY: '<yoursecretkeyTOEncryptDatabase>'
  API_KEY: '<YourAPIKey>'
  AGENT_PATH: '/agent'
  PORT: '3332'
  MESSAGING_PATH: '/messaging'
  DATABASE_URL: "postgresql://<username>:<password>@<linktoYourpostgressDB>/postgres"
  BASE_URL: "<domainAddressWhereVermaoAgentIsHosted>"

5 — templates/deployments.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: {{ .Values.appName }}
  namespace: {{ .Values.namespace }}
  labels:
    app: {{ .Values.appName }}
spec:
  replicas: {{ .Values.replicaCount }}
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: {{ .Values.appName }}
      tier: backend
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: {{ .Values.appName }}
        tier: backend
    spec: # Pod spec
      containers:
        - name: {{ .Values.appName }}-container
          image: {{ .Values.image.name }}:{{ .Values.image.tag }}
          ports:
            - containerPort: {{ .Values.port }}
          envFrom:
            - configMapRef:
                name: {{ .Values.configmap.name }}
          resources:
            limits:
              memory: '512Mi'
              cpu: '500m'

6 — templates/service.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: {{ .Values.appName }}
  namespace: {{ .Values.namespace }}
  labels:
    app: {{ .Values.appName }}
spec:
  ports:
    - port: {{ .Values.port }}
      targetPort: {{ .Values.port }}
      protocol: TCP
      name: {{ .Values.appName }}-service
  selector:
    app: {{ .Values.appName }}
    tier: backend

7 — templates/ingress.yaml

Please note that we assume that you already have a domain and tls certificate. If not, you can follow this excellent guide in order to set up a tls certificate using Let’s Encrypt. Our ingress.yaml file is given below:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: {{ .Values.appName }}-ingress
  annotations:
    cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: letsencrypt-prod
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  tls:
    - hosts:
        - {{ .Values.appName }}.<yourcustomdomain.com> # replace with your domain name
      secretName: tls-certificate-secret # replace with your tls secret name
  rules:
  - host: {{ .Values.appName }}.<yourcustomdomain.com> # replace with ur domain name
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: {{ .Values.appName }}
            port:
              number: {{ .Values.port }}

Deploy Veramo Agent to AKS using Helm

Please download and install kubeconfig from AKS before continuing:

az aks get-credentials --resource-group <yourResourceGroupName> --name <aksClusterName>

If you followed the guide in Part 1 the command will be as follows:

az aks get-credentials --resource-group veramo-resource-group --name veramo-cluster

Now we are ready to deploy Veramo agent using Helm. Please change to the root of the veramo-agent-deploy repository in your terminal and run the following command.

helm upgrade --install veramo-agent helm/ --values helm/values.yaml -f helm/values-dev.yaml

You should see the following output:

Congratulations you have successfully deployed Veramo Agent and Veramo Explorer on Azure Kubernetes Service.

If you have any further questions, please contact us at info@iso-gruppe.com.