Update of third party addon provider not working

[guettli]

What steps did you take and what happened:

We developed an addon provider which is not in the list of known addon providers.

Installing it via the cluster-api-operator works fine.

But during the upgrade we see that Condition, and the controller continuously reconciles:

ProviderUpgraded=False ComponentsUpgradeError "failed to get configuration for the AddonProvider with name foo. Please check the provider name and/or add configuration for new providers using the .clusterctl config file"

We found no way to provide a .clusterctl config, and I think it is not needed.

We provide a configMap:

apiVersion: v1
binaryData:
  components: ...
data:
  metadata: |-
    # maps release series of major.minor to cluster-api contract version
    # the contract version may change between minor or major versions, but *not*
    # between patch versions.
    #
    # update this file only when a new major or minor version is released
    apiVersion: clusterctl.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha3
    releaseSeries:
      - major: 1
        minor: 1
        contract: v1beta1
      - major: 1
        minor: 2
        contract: v1beta1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  annotations:
    provider.cluster.x-k8s.io/compressed: "true"
  labels:
    provider-components: foo
    provider.cluster.x-k8s.io/name: foo
    provider.cluster.x-k8s.io/type: addon
    provider.cluster.x-k8s.io/version: v1.2.1
  name: foo-v1.2.1
  namespace: mgt-system

We found a dirty work-around:

We forked cluster-api-operator, then we did go mod vendor to get the sources of vendor/sigs.k8s.io/cluster-api/cmd/clusterctl/client/config/providers_client.go.

Then we added our provider foo below the existing provider for helm:

providers_client.go#L403

This fixed the issue for us, and we could upgrade our custom addon provider.

What did you expect to happen:

Since the configMap is given, I think the cluster-api-operator should be able to upgrade the third party addon provider, even if the provider is not listed in the file providers_client.go.

Anything else you would like to add:

The cluster-api-operator worked fine for us, and this is our first issue.

Environment:

• Cluster-api-operator version: v0.10.1
• Cluster-api version: 1.7.1.

kubectl version                                                                                                                                                                   

Client Version: v1.29.3
Kustomize Version: v5.0.4-0.20230601165947-6ce0bf390ce3
Server Version: v1.29.2

We tried to create a PR to fix that, but we failed.

This following method sometimes found the provider foo and sometimes it did not find the provider:

func (p *providersClient) Get(name string, providerType clusterctlv1.ProviderType) (Provider, error) {

/kind bug

/area/upgrades

[alexander-demicev]

/triage accepted