Up and running with Kubernetes and Microk8s

by George Cadwallader
Canonical have been doing some awesome work with Microk8s. This program makes it super simple to get up and running fast with Kubernetes.
Code | Practically Academy
Apr 14, 2020

Installing the Microk8s snap couldn’t be much easier. However there are a couple of extra steps and gotchas if you want to install this in a VM on the DigitalOcean.



1
snap install microk8s --classic

You can alias the

1
kubectl

and

1
helm

commands if you don’t want to keep running

1
microk8s.kubectl

.



1
2
snap alias microk8s.kubectl kubectl

snap alias microk8s.helm helm

Microk8s makes it simple to enable common add-ons the ones we are enabling
are:



1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
#

# Dashboard for a bit of a nice interface to see what's happening

#

microk8s.enable dashboard



#

# Ingress for managing domain names

#

microk8s.enable ingress



#

# Helm so we can install services from templates

#

microk8s.enable helm

When we want to get to our dashboard we can’t login over http, so we need proxy connections to our local workstation. For this we will need to install

1
kubectl

locally, luckily this is also available as a snap, so we can install that with a

1
snap install kubectl

.

To get the config for your local

1
kubectl

you can run another handy command

1
microk8s.config

this will print a config file to the terminal that you can copy the into

1
~/.kube/config

then you can run

1
kubectl

locally.

Before you run the proxy command you can get your access token by running.



1
kubectl -n kube-system describe secret $(kubectl -n kube-system get secret | grep default-token | cut -d " " -f1)

Now we have setup

1
kubectl

locally you can run

1
kubectl proxy

to access your cluster from localhost. The URL to your dashboard will be



1
http://127.0.0.1:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy

More reads