Getting started with CAPL

Prerequisites

  • A Linode account
  • A Personal Access Token (PAT) created via the Linode Cloud Manager. Make sure to create the token with at least the following read/write permissions (or "all"):
    • Linodes
    • NodeBalancers
    • Images
    • Volumes
    • VPCs
    • IPs
    • Object Storage
    • Stackscripts
    • Firewalls
  • clusterctl is installed
  • Cluster API management cluster is created

For more information please see the Linode Guide.

Setting up your cluster environment variables

Once you have provisioned your PAT, save it in an environment variable along with other required settings:

export LINODE_REGION=us-ord
export LINODE_TOKEN=<your linode PAT>
export LINODE_CONTROL_PLANE_MACHINE_TYPE=g6-standard-2
export LINODE_MACHINE_TYPE=g6-standard-2

Info

Consider also setting the following environment variables: CONTROL_PLANE_MACHINE_COUNT=1 and WORKER_MACHINE_COUNT=1. These counts can also be modified case-by-case with the --control-plane-machine-count and --worker-machine-count flags. clusterctl defaults these to 1 and 0, respectively, which results in a control plane-only cluster with one node.

Info

This project uses linodego for Linode API interaction. Please refer to it for more details on environment variables used for client configuration.

Warning

For Regions and Images that do not yet support Akamai's cloud-init datasource CAPL will automatically use a stackscript shim to provision the node. If you are using a custom image ensure the cloud_init flag is set correctly on it

Setup management cluster

A clusterAPI management cluster is a kubernetes cluster that is responsible for managing the lifecycle of other child k8s clusters provisioned using Cluster API (CAPI). It serves as a control plane for provisioning, scaling, upgrading and deleting child kubernetes clusters.

Use any of the following to have a base management cluster:

  • Provision k8s cluster using LKE
  • Bring/Use your own provisioned k8s cluster to be configured as management cluster

Install CAPL on your management cluster

Warning

The linode-linode infrastructure provider requires clusterctl version 1.7.2 or higher

Install CAPL and enable the helm addon provider which is used by the majority of the CAPL flavors 
export KUBECONFIG=<mgmt-cluster-kubeconfig>
clusterctl init --infrastructure linode-linode --addon helm

Output will be something like:

Fetching providers
Installing cert-manager version="v1.16.0"
Waiting for cert-manager to be available...
Installing provider="cluster-api" version="v1.9.5" targetNamespace="capi-system"
Installing provider="bootstrap-kubeadm" version="v1.9.5" targetNamespace="capi-kubeadm-bootstrap-system"
Installing provider="control-plane-kubeadm" version="v1.9.5" targetNamespace="capi-kubeadm-control-plane-system"
Installing provider="infrastructure-linode-linode" version="v0.8.4" targetNamespace="capl-system"
Installing provider="addon-helm" version="v0.3.1" targetNamespace="caaph-system"

Your management cluster has been initialized successfully!

You can now create your first workload cluster by running the following:

  clusterctl generate cluster [name] --kubernetes-version [version] | kubectl apply -f -

Deploying your first cluster

Please refer to the default flavor section for creating your first Kubernetes cluster on Linode using Cluster API.