Starter infrastructure prerequisites

Prepare cloud, DNS, domain, and command-line access for the starter OpenTofu evaluation path.

Before you collect prerequisites, select the installation path:

Starter OpenTofu evaluation: Use this page. Then, set up the starter infrastructure. OpenTofu creates GKE or EKS, dependencies, DNS, and a Lifecycle Helm release.
Existing-cluster Helm evaluation: Skip the OpenTofu- and cloud-account-specific requirements on this page. Start with Install Lifecycle and validate the compatible cluster, ingress, DNS, TLS, storage, identity, and secret requirements for your release.

⚠️

Use both paths for evaluation only. Before shared-network exposure, examine the security boundaries.

This page applies to the starter OpenTofu evaluation path. Prepare these accounts, tools, and DNS capabilities:

GitHub account: Use a personal or organization GitHub account. Create a GitHub account.
Cloud provider account: Use an active Google Cloud or AWS account.
- Create a Google Cloud account and a project.
- Create an AWS account.

💡

An isolated cloud project or account keeps the evaluation resources away from other workloads.

CLI Tools
- OpenTofu — Infrastructure management tool.
- kubectl — Kubernetes command-line tool.
- gcloud or aws-cli — Command-line tool for the selected cloud provider.
Custom domain: Use a custom domain, for example, lifecycle.example.org, to route Environment traffic. The domain supports:
- Public callback and webhook URLs for the GitHub App
- Ingress routing in the Kubernetes cluster
- HTTPS access with TLS certificates
DNS provider with wildcard support: Use a provider that supports wildcard records, for example, *.lifecycle.example.org. Wildcards route traffic to Lifecycle and ephemeral Environments.

The infrastructure setup supports these wildcard DNS providers:

Manual setup

Open Google Cloud DNS.
Follow the Google Cloud instructions.
Create a public DNS zone for your domain.

The OpenTofu modules create the wildcard DNS records during the subsequent steps.

CLI setup Use the gcloud CLI to create a public DNS zone for your domain:

Add the Google Cloud DNS name server records to your domain. Find the records in the Google Cloud Console in the new DNS zone.

AWS Route 53: Amazon’s scalable DNS web service for routing users to Internet applications.

Manual setup

Authenticate with the AWS CLI using the intended role or user.
Make sure that your domain accepts wildcards. For example, use *.lifecycle.<your-domain>.com.

CLI check

Make sure that the returned public hosted zone agrees with the Lifecycle domain. Make sure that the registrar delegates to its name servers. Before cluster ingress provisioning, do not create a placeholder wildcard A record. The starter OpenTofu flow manages the necessary records.

If Cloudflare is your primary DNS provider, use a full setup. Configure Cloudflare to be the authoritative DNS provider. Follow the Cloudflare setup instructions.

Create a Cloudflare API token that can manage DNS records for that zone. The OpenTofu setup reads it from cloudflare_api_token in secrets.auto.tfvars. Do not commit that file. Do not print the token in command output. See the Lifecycle infrastructure repository for the token-scope requirements.

DNS record changes do not occur immediately.

Before you continue:

Make sure that the registrar uses the name servers of your DNS provider.
Make sure that you can use automation to manage the DNS records.
Use https://dnschecker.org/#NS to examine the domain name servers.

When you have these starter-path prerequisites, set up the evaluation cluster. If you currently operate a compatible cluster, use the existing-cluster Helm path.

Environment and Service statuses Set up an evaluation cluster