Testing Operator Deployment with OLM

This document discusses the behavior of operator-sdk <run|cleanup> subcommands related to OLM deployment, and assumes you are familiar with OLM, related terminology, and have read the SDK-OLM integration design proposal.

Currently only the package manifests format is supported by <run|cleanup> subcommands. Bundle support is coming soon.

Note: before continuing, please read the caveats section below.

operator-sdk <run|cleanup> packagemanifests command overview

operator-sdk <run|cleanup> packagemanifests assumes OLM is already installed and running on your cluster, and that your Operator has a valid package manifests format. See the CLI overview for commands to work with an OLM installation and generate a package manifests format.

Let’s look at the anatomy of the run packagemanifests (which is the same for cleanup) configuration model:

• kubeconfig-path: the local path to a kubeconfig.
  • This uses well-defined default loading rules to load the config if empty.
• namespace: the cluster namespace in which Operator resources are created.
  • This namespace must already exist in the cluster.
• manifests-dir: a directory containing the Operator’s package manifests.
• version: the version of the Operator to deploy. It must be a semantic version, ex. 0.0.1.
  • This version must match the version of the CSV manifest found in manifests-dir, ex. packagemanifests/0.0.1 in an Operator SDK project.
• install-mode: specifies which supported installMode should be used to create an OperatorGroup by configuring its spec.targetNamespaces field.
  • The InstallModeType string passed must be marked as “supported” in the CSV being installed. The namespaces passed must exist or be created by passing a Namespace manifest to IncludePaths.
  • This option understands the following strings (assuming your CSV does as well):
    • AllNamespaces: the Operator will watch all namespaces (cluster-scoped Operators). This is the default.
    • OwnNamespace: the Operator will watch its own namespace (from namespace or the kubeconfig default).
    • SingleNamespace="my-ns": the Operator will watch a namespace, not necessarily its own.
• timeout: a time string dictating the maximum time that run can run. The command will return an error if the timeout is exceeded.

Caveats

• <run|cleanup> packagemanifests are intended to be used for testing purposes only, since this command creates a transient image registry that should not be used in production. Typically a registry is deployed separately and a set of catalog manifests are created in the cluster to inform OLM of that registry and which Operator versions it can deploy and where to deploy the Operator.
• run packagemanifests can only deploy one Operator and one version of that Operator at a time, hence its intended purpose being testing only.