Install Stash Community Edition

Stash Community edition is available under AppsCode-Community-1.0.0 license and free to use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. It comes with all the basic backup functionalities. However, it lacks some advanced features such as Database Backup, Auto-Backup, Batch Backup, and Local Backend support, etc. compared to the Enterprise edition. A full features comparison between the Stash Community edition and Enterprise edition can be found here.

To use Stash Community edition, you can grab 1 year free license from here.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes version: Stash is compatible with any Kubernetes cluster with version 1.16 or later.
• Extended API server: Your cluster needs to support Kubernetes extended API server.
• Webhook support: Your cluster must support Kubernetes validation and mutation webhooks.
• RBAC permissions: Stash operator needs a few RBAC permissions on your cluster. You can find the list of the required RBAC permissions here.
• Installing on GKE cluster: To install Stash on your GKE cluster, please check the requirements here.
• NFS volume: If you are willing to use NFS volume as a backend, you need to customize the Stash installation like here.

Get a License

In this section, we are going to show you how you can get a 1 year free license for Stash Community edition. You can get a license for your Kubernetes cluster by going through the following steps:

• At first, go to AppsCode License Server and fill up the form. It will ask for your Name, Email, the product you want to install, and your cluster ID (UID of the kube-system namespace).
• Provide your name and email address. You can provide your personal or work email address.
• Then, select Stash Community Edition in the product field.
• Now, provide your cluster ID. You can get your cluster ID easily by running the following command:

kubectl get ns kube-system -o=jsonpath='{.metadata.uid}'

• Then, you have to agree with the terms and conditions. We recommend reading it before checking the box.
• Now, you can submit the form. After you submit the form, the AppsCode License server will send an email to the provided email address with a link to your license file.
• Navigate to the provided link and save the license into a file. Here, we save the license to a license.txt file.

Here is a screenshot of the license form.

You can create licenses for as many clusters as you want. You can upgrade your license any time without re-installing Stash by following the upgrading guide from here.

Stash licensing process has been designed to work with CI/CD workflow. You can automatically obtain a license from your CI/CD pipeline by following the guide from here.

Install

Stash operator can be installed as a Helm chart or simply as Kubernetes manifests.

• Helm 3 (Recommended)
• YAML

$ helm repo add appscode https://charts.appscode.com/stable/
$ helm repo update
$ helm search repo appscode/stash --version v2023.03.13
NAME            CHART VERSION         APP VERSION         DESCRIPTION
appscode/stash  v2023.03.13    v2023.03.13  Stash by AppsCode - Backup your Kubernetes native applications

$ helm install stash appscode/stash          \
  --version v2023.03.13                \
  --namespace kube-system                     \
  --set features.community=true               \
  --set-file global.license=/path/to/the/license.txt

$ helm repo add appscode https://charts.appscode.com/stable/
$ helm repo update
$ helm search repo appscode/stash --version v2023.03.13
NAME            CHART VERSION         APP VERSION         DESCRIPTION
appscode/stash  v2023.03.13    v2023.03.13  Stash by AppsCode - Backup your Kubernetes native applications

$ helm template stash appscode/stash          \
  --version v2023.03.13                \
  --namespace kube-system                     \
  --set features.community=true               \
  --set global.skipCleaner=true               \
  --set-file global.license=/path/to/the/license.txt | kubectl apply -f -

Verify installation

To check if Stash operator pods have started, run the following command:

$ ❯ kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -l app.kubernetes.io/name=stash-community --watch
NAMESPACE     NAME                                     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kube-system   stash-stash-community-66b86d9647-kcncc   2/2     Running   0          2m6s

Once the operator pod is running, you can cancel the above command by typing Ctrl+C.

Now, to confirm CRD groups have been registered by the operator, run the following command:

$ kubectl get crd -l app.kubernetes.io/name=stash

NAME                                      CREATED AT
backupconfigurations.stash.appscode.com   2020-08-24T08:20:54Z
backupsessions.stash.appscode.com         2020-08-24T08:20:55Z
functions.stash.appscode.com              2020-08-24T08:20:55Z
recoveries.stash.appscode.com             2020-08-24T08:20:54Z
repositories.stash.appscode.com           2020-08-24T08:20:54Z
restics.stash.appscode.com                2020-08-24T08:20:54Z
restoresessions.stash.appscode.com        2020-08-24T08:20:55Z
tasks.stash.appscode.com                  2020-08-24T08:20:55Z

Now, you are ready to take your first backup using Stash.