Harbor Registry - Automating LDAP/S Configuration - Part 1

The Harbor Registry is involved in many of my Kubernetes implementations in the field, and in almost every implementation I am asked about the options to configure LDAP/S authentication for the registry. Unfortuntely, neither the community Helm chart nor the Tanzu Harbor package provides native inputs for this setup. Fortunately, the Harbor REST API enables LDAP configuration programmatically. Automating this process ensures consistency across environments, faster deployments, and reduced chances of human error.

Harbor Registry – Automating LDAP/S Configuration – Part 2

This post continues our two-part series on automating LDAP configuration for Harbor Registry. In the previous post, we demonstrated how to achieve this using Ansible, running externally. However, external automation has its challenges, such as firewall restrictions or limited API access in some cases/environments.

Note: make sure you review the previous post as it provides a lot of additional background and clarifications on this process, LDAPS configuration, and more.

Here, we explore an alternative approach using Terraform, running the automation directly inside the Kubernetes cluster hosting Harbor. This method leverages native Kubernetes scheduling capabilities for running the configuration job in a fully declarative approach and does not require any network access to Harbor from the machine running the job.