Tooling

Introduction

Depending of your architecture and the way you want to administer your environment the tools can be installed on a admin workstation, a jump host on your vdc or inside the bootstrap server.

The choice is up to you, for this documentation we will use the bootstrap cluster to install this tools.

Mandatory tools

kubectl

Depending of your distribution follow the steps provided by the Kubernetes documentation : * kubectl Installation

Tools for KaaS Standard

clusterctl

• Download the binary :

curl -L https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api/releases/download/v1.1.3/clusterctl-linux-amd64 -o clusterctl

• Make the clusterctl binary executable

chmod +x ./clusterctl

• Move the binary in to your PATH

sudo mv ./clusterctl /usr/local/bin/clusterctl

• Test to ensure the version you installed is up-to-date:

clusterctl version

git

• Git Installation

ytt

wget -O- https://carvel.dev/install.sh > install.sh

bash install.sh

Tanzu packages tooling [Optional]

To retrieve the cli bundle tar.gz file below it is require to download it from the VMware Website, a free account is required and must be created before.

• Download Link

tanzu cli

tar -xvzf tanzu-cli-bundle-linux-amd64.tar.gz
cd cli
install core/v0.11.4/tanzu-core-linux_amd64 /usr/local/bin/tanzu
tanzu version
tanzu plugin sync

Carvel

using the files downloaded for tanzi-cli

gunzip kapp-linux-amd64-v0.42.0+vmware.2.gz
chmod ugo+x kapp-linux-amd64-v0.42.0+vmware.2
mv ./kapp-linux-amd64-v0.42.0+vmware.2 /usr/local/bin/kapp

Verify the installation

kapp version

kbld

using the files downloaded for tanzi-cli

gunzip kbld-linux-amd64-v0.31.0+vmware.1.gz
chmod ugo+x kbld-linux-amd64-v0.31.0+vmware.1
mv ./kbld-linux-amd64-v0.31.0+vmware.1 /usr/local/bin/kbld

imgpkg

using the files downloaded for tanzi-cli

gunzip imgpkg-linux-amd64-v0.22.0+vmware.1.gz
 chmod ugo+x imgpkg-linux-amd64-v0.22.0+vmware.1
mv ./imgpkg-linux-amd64-v0.22.0+vmware.1 /usr/local/bin/imgpkg

Optional tools

The following tools are not mandatory but can help a lot to manage & troubleshoot your clusters. Feel free to use it or not.

kctx

kctx is a script that help to switch between kubernetes clusters without manage the complexity of kubeconfig files & context.

Basically kctx will create a symlink between the kubeconfig file you choose and the actual kubeconfig file used by default by kubectl & clusterctl.

When you launch the kctx command, a list will be displayed with all the kubeconfig files added in ~/.kube then you just have to choose the cluster you want to use, and that’s all.

Prerequisite

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

sudo apt-get install fzf

or

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git ~/.fzf
~/.fzf/install

Add your kubeconfig files

Put all your kubeconfig files in ~/.kube/

Create new file in ~/.kctx.sh

kctx() {
  (
    cd ~/.kube/ || exit 1
    # shellcheck disable=SC2012
    KUBE=$(ls kube-* | fzf)
    [[ -n "$KUBE" ]] && ln -sf "$KUBE" config
  )
}

Add this line in the ~/.bashrc file

. ~/.kctx.sh

Activate the new command

source ~/.bashrc

Then, you can switch between kubeconfig file by launching kctx command

kctx

k9s

k9s is a very powerful terminal “GUI” that can be used to browse Kubernetes clusters & objects:

• How to install K9S