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Claim additional payments for teaching - Connect to an instance running in Azure

This Rails app runs on the Teacher Services Cloud Kubernetes infrastructure in Azure.

Follow these instructions to run a Rake task or open a Rails console.

1. Authenticate to the Kubernetes cluster

You'll need to configure your command line console so it can connect to the Kubernetes cluster. Your authenticated state should persist for several days, but you may need to re-authenticate every once in a while.

  1. Login to the Microsoft Azure portal

    Use your @digitalauth.education.gov.uk account.

    Make sure it says "DfE Platform Identity" in the top right corner of the screen below your name. If not, click the settings/cog icon and choose it from the list of directories.

  2. Open a console. Navigate to the claim-additional-payments-for-teaching repo directory and run:

    az login

    If you have trouble logging in, try switching browser. Chrome is known to be buggy with this step, so copy & paste the URL into Safari instead.

    Otherwise you might have more success with this command:

    az login --use-device-code

  3. Install kubetctl:

    brew install Azure/kubelogin/kubelogin

  4. Then run one of these commands:

    make test get-cluster-credentials # for test and review apps
make production get-cluster-credentials CONFIRM_PRODUCTION=yes # for production

  5. Assuming everything worked correctly, you should now be able to access the Kubernetes cluster using the kubectl command.

    You can test you have access by running one of these commands:

    kubectl -n srtl-test get deployments # for test and review apps
kubectl -n srtl-production get deployments # for production

    You should see a list of Kubernetes deployments.

2. Get the Kubernetes Deployment name

Multiple instances of the app run on the test cluster, one for each Pull Request that has a deploy label, plus our test app itself. Each one is a Kubernetes Deployment resource.

Review apps

Our review apps are under the srtl-development namespace within the test cluster.

To connect to a review app, the deployment is named after the PR number followed by either web, postgres or worker:

claim-additional-payments-for-teaching-review-[PR_NUMBER]-web
claim-additional-payments-for-teaching-review-[PR_NUMBER]-postgres
claim-additional-payments-for-teaching-review-[PR_NUMBER]-worker

For example, the worker for PR 123 would be claim-additional-payments-for-teaching-review-123-worker.

For a list of all active review deployments, run:

kubectl -n srtl-development get deployments

Test app

Our test app is under the srtl-test namespace within the test cluster.

For a list of all test deployments, run:

kubectl -n srtl-test get deployments

Production app

Our production app is under the srtl-production namespace within the production cluster.

For a list of all test deployments, run:

kubectl -n srtl-production get deployments

Accessing production deployments requires a PIM (Privileged Identity Management) request.

3. Connect to a running container

To run the following commands, replace NAMESPACE with one of:

srtl-production # for production
srtl-test # for test
srtl-development # for review apps

Replace DEPLOYMENT_NAME with the deployment you want to target e.g. claim-additional-payments-for-teaching-test-worker.

Open a Rails console

Open an interactive Rails console using this command:

kubectl -n ${NAMESPACE} exec -it deployment/${DEPLOYMENT_NAME} -- rails console

Open a shell console

Open an interactive Linux shell using this command:

kubectl -n ${NAMESPACE} exec -it deployment/${DEPLOYMENT_NAME} -- sh

Run a Rake task

Run Rake tasks using this command:

kubectl -n ${NAMESPACE} exec -it deployment/${DEPLOYMENT_NAME} -- rake ${TASK_TO_RUN}

Or list all available Rake tasks with:

kubectl -n ${NAMESPACE} exec -it deployment/${DEPLOYMENT_NAME} -- rake -T