Getting Started with Carvel ytt - Real-World Examples

Over the years of working with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), one tool has stood out as a game-changer for resource customization: Carvel’s ytt. Whether tailoring cluster manifests, customizing TKG packages, or addressing unique deployment requirements, ytt has consistently been a fundamental part of the workflow. Its flexibility, power, and declarative approach make it an essential tool for anyone working deeply with Kubernetes in a TKG ecosystem.

But what exactly is ytt? Short for YAML Templating Tool, ytt is part of the Carvel suite of tools designed for Kubernetes resource management. It provides a powerful, programmable approach to templating YAML configurations by combining straightforward data values, overlays, and scripting capabilities. Unlike many traditional templating tools, ytt prioritizes structure and intent, making it easier to maintain, validate, and debug configurations—particularly in complex, large-scale Kubernetes environments.

Getting Harbor to trust your LDAPS certificate in TKG

In a recent TKG implementation, it was required to configure Harbor with LDAPS rather than LDAP.

I deployed the Harbor package on the TKG shared services cluster and configured LDAP. However, when testing the connection, I received an error message that was not informative at all:

Failed to verify LDAP server with error: error: ldap server network timeout.

Although the error message doesn’t explicitly say there’s a certificate issue and there is nothing in the harbor-core container logs, it immediately made sense to me that the harbor-core container didn’t trust my LDAPS/CA certificate, so I started investigating how the certificate could be injected somehow into Harbor. The Harbor package doesn’t have any input for the LDAPS/CA certificate in its data values file, so I knew I had to create my own YTT overlay.