📦 Deploying Apps

Everything your team deploys lives in a namespace, and each application is a project. This page explains both and how to manage versions.

Namespaces

A namespace is a place to group your applications — think of it as a folder or a team's space. Mars creates one real Kubernetes namespace for each of these.

• Create — click the + button in the top-right corner, give it a name, and create it.
• Public vs private — public namespaces are visible to anyone logged in; private ones only to people you add (see Permissions).
• Favorite — star a namespace so it's easy to find.
• Transfer — hand ownership of a namespace to another user (only the owner can do this).

Projects

A project ties a Git repository to a Helm chart so Mars knows how to deploy it.

Create a project

1. Open your namespace and add a project.
2. Choose the Git repository and branch.
3. Set the chart directory — where the Helm chart lives:
   • In this repository: just write the folder path (e.g. charts).
   • In another project: use project-id|branch|path, e.g. 12|main|charts.

Configure the chart values

After you set the chart directory, Mars loads a default values.yaml that you can edit. This file controls things like the image tag, replicas and domain.

You can use these built-in variables (surrounded by <>, so they don't clash with Helm's own templates):

Variable	What it becomes
<.Branch>	the current Git branch
<.Commit>	the current commit
<.Pipeline>	the GitLab pipeline number
<.Host1> … <.Host10>	your domain(s), up to 10
<.TlsSecret1> … <.TlsSecret10>	the matching HTTPS certificate secret
<.ClusterIssuer>	the certificate issuer (if you use cert-manager)
<.ImagePullSecrets>	your private-registry credentials

Example:

image:
  repository: myapp
  tag: "<.Branch>-<.Pipeline>"    # e.g. main-1234

ingress:
  enabled: true
  hosts:
    - host: <.Host1>
  tls:
    - secretName: <.TlsSecret1>
      hosts:
        - <.Host1>

Remember to save your chart directory before configuring values — the values are loaded from that directory.

Deploy / upgrade

Click Deploy to install the app (or to update it — a new deployment becomes a rolling update). While testing, use debug mode so the deployment continues even if a step fails.

Roll back

Every deployment is saved as a version. If something goes wrong:

1. Open the project's version history.
2. Find the last good version.
3. Click roll back — Mars reinstalls that version.

Resource topology

Open the project's resource tree to see how the app's components (deployments, services, ingresses…) depend on each other — a handy overview when something isn't connecting.

Per-branch settings (.mars.yaml)

You can also put a .mars.yaml file in the repository to define settings per branch — chart location, default values, allowed branches, and so on. This keeps deployment config close to the code.

# where the chart lives in this repository
local_chart_path: charts
# only show these branches in the UI
branches:
  - main
  - dev
# default values (like a values.yaml)
values_yaml: |
  replicaCount: 1
  image:
    repository: myapp
    tag: "<.Branch>-<.Pipeline>"