SUSE Rancher Cookbook

A quick start guide to installing Sextant on a SUSE Rancher managed Kubernetes cluster.

License

Use of the Sextant Community Edition is governed by our Marketplace EULA with the exception of Chronicle and Daml support which is subject to our Evaluation EULA.

Useful Links

• Sextant Overview
• Sextant Docs

Prerequisites

To install the Sextant Community edition, you will need to obtain user credentials from BTP. If you don't have these already, you can request them here.

You will also need the following:

• SUSE Rancher v2.6 or later with a Kubernetes cluster v1.19 or later
• kubectl configured to access your cluster

Install Sextant

Log in to Rancher and select the cluster you want to install Sextant on. In our example, this will be the local Rancher cluster:

From the left menu, select Apps & Marketplace and then Charts. Choose the Sextant chart from the list of partner charts:

This will take you to the following screen:

Here, you will need to specify the namespace and name for your Sextant installation. In our example, we will use sextant in both cases.

Note

If the namespace doesn't exist, the installation process will automatically create this for you.

Important

Make sure you have your BTP supplied credentials ready before continuing to the next step. As noted above, you can request these here.

Now, click the Next button on the bottom right of the page:

On this screen you can configure your Sextant installation. On the left hand side, you will find three options:

• User Credentials - The only required fields are the Username and Password credentials that you obtained from BTP. These are entered here.
• Ingress Settings - If you'd like to enable an ingress for Sextant, you can specify this here. This is optional.
• Database Settings - If you'd like to use an external Postgres database, you can specify this here. This is also optional.

Enter your user credentials in the form, and then click the Install button on the bottom right of the page.

Rancher will now install Sextant on your local cluster. It may take a few minutes for the Sextant images to be pulled down to your cluster from our private repo:

Once the installation has completed, you will see the NOTES from the installation. In our example, these are:

NOTES:
1. Get the initial Sextant application username and password by running this
command kubectl describe pod/sextant-0 --namespace sextant | grep INITIAL_
2. Get the application URL by running these commands:
export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods -l "app.kubernetes.io/name=sextant" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
echo "Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080 to use your application"
kubectl port-forward $POD_NAME 8080:80

Make a note of these instructions, as we will now switch to a local terminal window to finish setting up Sextant.

Once you've opened a local terminal, start by confirming that you can connect to your Kubernetes cluster using kubectl by running this command:

kubectl get pods

Then, run the first command from the installation NOTES. In our example, this is:

kubectl describe pod/sextant-0 --namespace sextant | grep INITIAL_

This will display the initial username/password combination for your Sextant installation.

Important

Make sure you save this combination, as it will not be possible to retrieve it if the Sextant deployment is restarted.

Now, run the second command from the installation NOTES. In our example, this is:

export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods -l "app.kubernetes.io/name=sextant" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
echo "Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080 to use your application"
kubectl port-forward $POD_NAME 8080:80

This will set up a port forward to your Sextant install, and make it accessible on your local machine:

Switch back to your browser and open the URL shown in the terminal output. In our example, this is http://127.0.0.1:8080. This will load the Sextant UI where you can log in using the initial username/password retrieved earlier:

At this point, you are all set to start using Sextant to deploy and manage blockchain networks. The first thing you will need to do is add a cluster to Sextant. Detailed instructions on how to do this can be found here.

Note

Assuming that your local cluster has at least four nodes, you can add this to Sextant and use it to deploy a four node distributed ledger network.

Important

To access all Sextant's features, you can also apply for a Sextant Enterprise Edition evaluation here.