Skip to main content

Kubernetes Installation

CleverThis ships a Helm chart for production Kubernetes deployments. This path is recommended for teams that need high availability, horizontal scaling, or multi-environment cluster management.

Prerequisites​

  • Kubernetes 1.28+
  • Helm 3.12+
  • An ingress controller (nginx-ingress or similar)
  • A cert-manager installation (for TLS)
  • An external PostgreSQL instance (RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure Database, etc.)
  • An external Redis instance (ElastiCache, Upstash, etc.)

Add the Helm repository​

helm repo add cleverthis https://charts.cleverthis.com
helm repo update

Create the values file​

Copy the default values and edit:

helm show values cleverthis/cleverthis > values.yaml

Key values to set:

global:
  domain: api.your-domain.com
  webappDomain: app.your-domain.com

api:
  replicas: 2
  env:
    DATABASE_URL: "postgresql://user:pass@your-rds-host:5432/cleverthis"
    REDIS_URL: "redis://your-redis-host:6379/0"
    SECRET_KEY: "your-secret-key"
    OPENAI_API_KEY: "sk-..."

webapp:
  replicas: 2
  env:
    NEXTAUTH_SECRET: "your-nextauth-secret"
    NEXTAUTH_URL: "https://app.your-domain.com"

ingress:
  enabled: true
  className: nginx
  tls:
    enabled: true
    certManager: true

Install the chart​

kubectl create namespace cleverthis

helm install cleverthis cleverthis/cleverthis \
  --namespace cleverthis \
  --values values.yaml

Run migrations as a Job​

The chart includes a pre-install Helm hook that runs Alembic migrations before the API pods start. Check its status:

kubectl get jobs -n cleverthis
kubectl logs job/cleverthis-migrate -n cleverthis

Scaling​

Scale the API and webapp independently:

kubectl scale deployment cleverthis-api --replicas=4 -n cleverthis
kubectl scale deployment cleverthis-webapp --replicas=3 -n cleverthis
Coming soon

Helm chart values reference, HorizontalPodAutoscaler configuration, and multi-region deployment patterns are being documented.