Alfalfa is an open source web application forged in the melting pot of Building Energy Modeling (BEM), Building Controls, and Software Engineering domain expertise. Alfalfa transforms a Building Energy Models (BEMs) into virtual buildings by providing industry standard building control interfaces for interacting with models as they run. From a software engineering perspective, Alfalfa leverages widely adopted open source products and is architected according to best practices for a robust, modular, and scalable architecture.
The chart/ contains the complete Alfalfa application:
- Application Services: Web UI, Worker processes
- Data Stores: MongoDB, Redis, MinIO (S3-compatible storage), InfluxDB
- Monitoring: Grafana dashboards
- Application Ingresses: Routes for web, grafana, and minio
This repository includes automated release workflows. Charts are automatically packaged and published when GitHub releases are created:
- GitHub Releases: Download chart packages (.tgz) directly from releases
- Helm Repository: Available at
https://nrel.github.io/alfalfa-helm - OCI Registry: Available at
oci://ghcr.io/nrel/alfalfa-helm/alfalfa
# From Helm repository
helm repo add alfalfa https://nrel.github.io/alfalfa-helm
helm repo update
helm install alfalfa alfalfa/alfalfa
# From OCI registry
helm install alfalfa oci://ghcr.io/nrel/alfalfa-helm/alfalfa
# From GitHub release
curl -LO https://github.com/NREL/alfalfa-helm/releases/latest/download/alfalfa-<version>.tgz
helm install alfalfa ./alfalfa-<version>.tgz- Kubernetes 1.20+ cluster
- Helm client (v3.4.2 or higher)
- kubectl client (v1.20.0 or higher)
Install Alfalfa with default settings:
helm upgrade --install alfalfa ./chart --namespace alfalfa --create-namespaceTo uninstall/delete the alfalfa helm chart:
helm delete alfalfa
The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release including persistent volumes. See more about persistent volumes below. *Make sure to run this command before deleting the k8s cluster itself as many cloud providers retain the persistent volumes on k8s deletion. The helm delete command will remove everything.
The following table lists common configurable parameters of the alfalfa chart and their default values. This list is not representative of the full list. You can override any of the values.yaml by specify the parameter name using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example, to change the data storage for mongo from the default 100GB to 200GB, you would run this install command:
helm install alfalfa alfalfa/alfalfa --set mongodb.persistence.size=200Gi
Alternatively, you can create a values.yaml file you pass to helm via the --values
For information about what each value does see the VALUES.md.
Once you install the chart it'll take a couple of minutes to start all the containers. You can verify all the Kubernetes pods are up in running by running the following.
kubectl get po
example output of all pods running:
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
goaws-899f94b7d-fpxnx 1/1 Running 0 74s
mc-xnk7l 0/1 Completed 0 74s
minio-7ff55bc775-4hpwf 1/1 Running 0 75s
mongo-8448cb556c-zlwmr 1/1 Running 0 74s
nginx-ingress-6797b7b778-pnxzj 1/1 Running 0 74s
redis-55498c6cdd-xz2hb 1/1 Running 0 74s
web-64f5659554-rntjk 1/1 Running 0 74s
worker-7856c6d8fd-8phrl 1/1 Running 0 74s
worker-7856c6d8fd-b6pht 1/1 Running 0 74s
Once the cluster is up and running, you can use kubectl get svc ingress-load-balancer to determine the external IP or Domain Name to access alfalfa and use this to connect to the alfalfa web dashboard and the Kibana ELK dashboard if you enable the optional logging stack.
AWS
$ kubectl get svc ingress-load-balancer
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
ingress-load-balancer LoadBalancer 10.100.191.93 af021bf2cf1e6402780053ddb1109853-270686644.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com 80:31092/TCP,443:30635/TCP,9000:30843/TCP 108s
You will then use this EXTERNAL-IP to use with alfalfa cli commands. For the examples above, these would be: AWS: http://a0a4014d98f0211ea91cb06528280f48-1900622776.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com
Note that if you enabled https and have a domain, it's accessible via your domain name. e.g. https://myalfalfa.net
This helm chart provisions persistent storage for the database (MongoDB). This volume will persist throughout the life of the helm chart while it's running. It will NOT persist if you delete the helm chart. The volumes will be deleted along with it.
The worker pods can be configured to auto-scale based on CPU threshold (default 50%). So once the aggregate CPU for all worker pods exceeds the defined threshold (in this case 50%), the Kubernetes engine will start adding additional worker pods up to the maximum specified. This is also dependent on how the Kuebernetes cluster was configured as additional VM node instances will also be added. Please refer to the notes on aws and google when setting up the cluster and note the instance type and maximum nodes specified.