blog.rymcg.tech

Self-hosted, Open Source, Freedom

Self-Hosted Literate K3s Cluster

This series of blog posts comprises a Literate Programming notebook for the BASH shell, for the purpose of bootstrapping a self-hosted K3s kubernetes cluster using GitOps (Git+DevOps) principles. Flux (v2) is a controller that runs on top of kubernetes, that will synchronize your git repositories, containing all of your kubernetes manifests (YAML), and automatically apply these changes to your cluster. With Flux, you can administer all of your infrastructure via pull request!

Self-hosted means running full-stack, open-source software, on top of commodity computer hardware or virtual machines, with as little reliance on external services as feasable. It doesn’t mean you have to run on bare-metal hardware in your basement, that you built from transistors and Verilog, but it does mean that you should be able to do that if you want to! (The example cluster will keep it simple, and just use a simple DigitalOcean droplet instead. 😉) Kubernetes is an abstraction that makes the host platform irrelevant, giving you this freedom back. You can run the same workloads in K3s as you can in any other enterprise kubernetes host. K3s is easy to install, and runs just about anywhere, on bare-metal, on virtual machines (droplets), in docker, as well as several different CPU architectures. However, this blog will only focus on using the amd64 architecture. Sorry, Raspberry Pis are NOT tested to work with these instructions.

In this series, you will learn, and more:

  • How to setup your workstation for all development tools. (Tested on Arch Linux, but should work on any OS with the BASH shell.) Or, how to create a utility container, with all of the tools inside, and keeping your host system clean.
  • How to create a K3s cluster on generic hardware, or on DigitalOcean.
  • How to host Traefik (v2) to proxy HTTP and TCP traffic (Ingress) to your applications, giving you free TLS (https) certificates from Let’s Encrypt (best option for public websites) or from your private Certificate Authority via Step-CA (for private APIs and Mutual TLS) (Only Step CLI with an offline CA is described thus far [most secure option], but you could run your own online ACME CA if you want to [but harder to secure]).
  • How to host your own public and private git repositories in Gitea (and how to mirror them to GitHub for backup.)
  • How to host Flux (v2), such that your cluster state is driven by your git repository state. (use git push, not kubectl apply).
  • How to host a private container registry for hosting your own container images.
  • How to host simple applications like Wordpress, and the MySQL database.
  • How to create “serverless” functions with OpenFaaS.
  • How to create a Continuous Integration platform with Drone.

This blog uses Literate Programming concepts. You just need a web-browser and a BASH terminal. There are literal code blocks for you to copy and paste into your terminal to reproduce all of the files and commands necessary for this setup. There is no additional git repository you need to clone or fork. The commands you see on this blog are all you need, in order to create your own self-hosted git repository, from scratch. This will all be explained in detail in Part 1.

You can discuss this blog on Matrix (Element): #blog-rymcg-tech:enigmacurry.com

This blog is copyright EnigmaCurry and dual-licensed CC-BY-SA and MIT. The source is on github: enigmacurry/blog.rymcg.tech and PRs are welcome. ❤️

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