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Workflow & Basics

DevSpace fully automates the manual work of deploying Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts or components.

Start Deployment

When you run one of the following commands, DevSpace will run the deployment process:

• devspace deploy (before deploying the application)
• devspace dev (before deploying the application and starting the development mode)

Important Flags

The following flags are available for all commands that trigger the deployment process:

• -b / --force-build rebuild all images (even if they could be skipped because context and Dockerfile have not changed)
• -d / --force-deploy redeploy all deployments (even if they could be skipped because they have not changed)

Deployment Process

DevSpace loads the deployments configuration from devspace.yaml and builds one deployment after another in the order that they are specified in the deployments array. Additionally, DevSpace also deploys related projects speficied in dependencies.

1. Build & Deploy Dependencies

DevSpace loads the dependencies section from the devspace.yaml and creates a dependency tree. The current project will represent the root of this tree. Based on this dependency tree, DevSpace will start from the leaves and run these steps for each dependency:

• Build images of the dependency as configured in the images section of the dependency's devspace.yaml (unless skipBuild: true)
• Deploy the dependency as configured in the deployments section of the dependency's devspace.yaml

Learn more about deploying dependencies with DevSpace.

Dependencies allow you to deploy microservices, that the project you are currently deploying relies on. Dependencies can be located in a subpath of your project or they can be automatically loaded from a different git reporsitory.

2. Build, Tag & Push Images

DevSpace triggers the image building process for the images specified in the images section of the devspace.yaml.

Learn more about image building with DevSpace.

3. Tag Replacement

After finishing the image building process, DevSpace searches your deployments for references to the images that are specified in the images section of the devspace.yaml. If DevSpace finds that an image is used by one of your deployments and the deployment does not explicitly define a tag for the image, DevSpace will append the tag that has been auto-generated as part of the automated image tagging during the image building process.

To use automated tag replacement, make sure you do not specify image tags in the deployment configuration.

Replacing or appending tags to images that are used in your deployments makes sure that your deployments are always started using the most recently pushed image tag. This automated process saves a lot of time compared to manually replacing image tags each time before you deploy something.

4. Deploy Project

DevSpace iterates over every item in the deployments array defined in the devspace.yaml and deploy each of the deployments using the respective deployment tool:

• kubectl deployments will be deployed with kubectl (optionally using kustomize if kustomize: true)
• helm deployments will be deployed with the helm client that comes in-built with DevSpace
• component deployments will be deployed with the helm client that comes in-built with DevSpace

Deployments with kubectl require kubectl to be installed.

For helm and component deployments, DevSpace will automatically launch Tiller as a server-side component and setup RBAC for Tiller, so that it can only access the namespace it is deployed into.

We are waiting for Helm v3 to become stable, so we will not need to start a Tiller pod anymore to deploy Helm charts.

Useful Commands

devspace open

To view your project in the browser either via port-forwarding or via ingress (domain), run the following command:

devspace open

When DevSpace asks you how to open your application, you have two options as shown here:

? How do you want to open your application?
  [Use arrows to move, space to select, type to filter]
> via localhost (provides private access only on your computer via port-forwarding)
  via domain (makes your application publicly available via ingress)

To use the second option, you either need to make sure the DNS of your domain points to your Kubernetes cluster and you have an ingress-controller running in your cluster OR you use DevSpace Cloud, either in form of Hosted Spaces or by connecting your own cluster using the command devspace connect cluster.

If your application does not open as exepected, run devspace analyze and DevSpace will try to identify the issue.

devspace analyze

If your application is not starting as expected or there seems to be some kind of networking issue, you can let DevSpace run an automated analysis of your namespace using the following command:

devspace analyze

After analyzing your namespace, DevSpace compiles a report with potential issues, which is a good starting point for debugging and fixing issues with your deployments.

devspace list deployments

To get a list of all deployments as well as their status and other information, run the following command:

devspace list deployments

devspace purge

If you want to delete a deployment from kubernetes you can run:

# Removes all deployments remotely
devspace purge
# Removes deployment with given name
devspace purge --deployments=my-deployment-1,my-deployment-2

Purging a deployment does not remove it from the deployments section in the devspace.yaml. It just removes the deployment from the Kubernetes cluster. To remove a deployment from devspace.yaml, run devspace remove deployment [NAME].

devspace update dependencies

If you are using dependencies from other git repositories, use the following command to update the cached git repositories of dependencies:

devspace update dependencies