⛵ Cluster Template

Welcome to my opinionated and extensible template for deploying a single Kubernetes cluster. The goal of this project is to make it easier for people interested in using Kubernetes to deploy a cluster at home on bare-metal or VMs. This template closely mirrors my personal home-ops repository.

At a high level this project makes use of makejinja to read in a configuration file which renders out templates that will allow you to install and manage your Kubernetes cluster with.

✨ Features

The features included will depend on the type of configuration you want to use. There are currently 2 different types of configurations available with this template.

"Flux cluster" - a Kubernetes cluster deployed on-top of Talos Linux with an opinionated implementation of Flux using GitHub as the Git provider and sops to manage secrets.
- Required: Some knowledge of Containers, YAML, and Git.
- Components: flux, cilium, cert-manager, spegel, and reloader.
"Flux cluster with Cloudflare" - An addition to "Flux cluster" that provides DNS and SSL with Cloudflare. Cloudflare Tunnel is also included to provide external access to certain applications deployed in your cluster.
- Required: A Cloudflare account with a domain managed in your Cloudflare account.
- Components: ingress-nginx, external-dns and cloudflared.

Other features include:

Dev env managed w/ mise
Workflow automation w/ GitHub Actions
Dependency automation w/ Renovate
Flux HelmRelease and Kustomization diffs w/ flux-local

🚀 Let's Go!

There are 4 stages outlined below for completing this project, make sure you follow the stages in order.

Stage 1: Machine Preparation

System Requirements

Important

The included behaviour of Talos is that all nodes are able to run workloads, including the controller nodes. Worker nodes are therefore optional.
Do you have 3 or more nodes? It is highly recommended to make 3 of them controller nodes for a highly available control plane.
Running the cluster on Proxmox? My thoughts and recommendations about that are here.

Role	Cores	Memory	System Disk
Control	4 (6)*	8GB (24GB)*	120GB (500GB)* SSD/NVMe
Worker	4 (6)*	8GB (24GB)*	120GB (500GB)* SSD/NVMe
* recommended

Head over to the Talos Linux Image Factory and follow the instructions. Be sure to only choose the bare-minimum system extensions as some might require additional configuration and prevent Talos from booting without it. You can always add system extensions after Talos is installed and working.
This will eventually lead you to download a Talos Linux ISO file (or for SBCs the RAW file). Make sure to note the schematic ID you will need this later on.
Flash the Talos ISO or RAW file to a USB drive and boot from it on your nodes.

Stage 2: Local Workstation

Create a new public repository by clicking the big green "Use this template" button at the top of this page.
Use git clone to download the repo you just created to your local workstation and cd into it.
Install and activate mise following the instructions for your workstation here.
Use mise to install the required CLI tools:

📍 If mise is having trouble compiling Python, try running mise settings python.compile=0 and try these commands again
```
mise trust
mise install
mise run deps
```

Stage 3: Template Configuration

Important

The config.sample.yaml file contains config that are vital to the template process.

Generate the config.yaml from the config.sample.yaml configuration file:

📍 If the below command fails mise is either not install or configured incorrectly.
```
task init
```
Fill out the config.yaml configuration file using the comments in that file as a guide.
Template out all the configuration files:
```
task configure
```
Push your changes to git:

📍 Verify all the ./kubernetes/**/*.sops.* files are encrypted with SOPS
```
git add -A
git commit -m "chore: initial commit :rocket:"
git push
```

Stage 4: Bootstrap Talos, Kubernetes, and Flux

Install Talos:

📍 It might take a while for the cluster to be setup (10+ minutes is normal). During which time you will see a variety of error messages like: "couldn't get current server API group list," "error: no matching resources found", etc. 'Ready' will remain "False" as no CNI is deployed yet. This is a normal. If this step gets interrupted, e.g. by pressing Ctrl + C, you likely will need to reset the cluster before trying again
```
task bootstrap:talos
```

Push your changes to git:

git add -A
git commit -m "chore: add talhelper encrypted secret :lock:"
git push

Install cilium, coredns, spegel, flux and sync the cluster to the repository state:
```
task bootstrap:apps
```
Watch the rollout of your cluster happen:

📍 Depending on the features you choose a successful rollout will include pods being deployed into the cert-manager, flux-system, kube-system and network namespaces
```
watch kubectl get pods --all-namespaces
```

📣 Flux w/ Cloudflare post installation

🌐 Public DNS

Tip

Use the external ingress class to make applications public to the internet.

The external-dns application created in the networking namespace will handle creating public DNS records. By default, echo-server and the flux-webhook are the only subdomains reachable from the public internet. In order to make additional applications public you must set set the correct ingress class name and ingress annotations like in the HelmRelease for echo-server.

🏠 Home DNS

Tip

Use the internal ingress class to make applications private to your network. If you're having trouble with internal DNS resolution check out this GitHub discussion.

k8s_gateway will provide DNS resolution to external Kubernetes resources (i.e. points of entry to the cluster) from any device that uses your home DNS server. For this to work, your home DNS server must be configured to forward DNS queries for ${cloudflare.domain} to ${cloudflare.gateway_vip} instead of the upstream DNS server(s) it normally uses. This is a form of split DNS (aka split-horizon DNS / conditional forwarding).

... Nothing working? That is expected, this is DNS after all!

📜 Certificates

By default this template will deploy a wildcard certificate using the Let's Encrypt staging environment, which prevents you from getting rate-limited by the Let's Encrypt production servers if your cluster doesn't deploy properly (for example due to a misconfiguration). Once you are sure you will keep the cluster up for more than a few hours be sure to switch to the production servers as outlined in config.yaml.

🪝 Github Webhook

By default Flux will periodically check your git repository for changes. In order to have Flux reconcile on git push you must configure Github to send push events to Flux.

Important

This will only work after you have switched over certificates to the Let's Encrypt Production servers.

Obtain the webhook path:

📍 Hook id and path should look like /hook/12ebd1e363c641dc3c2e430ecf3cee2b3c7a5ac9e1234506f6f5f3ce1230e123
```
kubectl -n flux-system get receiver github-receiver -o jsonpath='{.status.webhookPath}'
```

Piece together the full URL with the webhook path appended:

https://flux-webhook.${cloudflare.domain}/hook/12ebd1e363c641dc3c2e430ecf3cee2b3c7a5ac9e1234506f6f5f3ce1230e123

Navigate to the settings of your repository on Github, under "Settings/Webhooks" press the "Add webhook" button. Fill in the webhook URL and your ${github.webhook_token} secret in config.yaml, Content type: application/json, Events: Choose Just the push event, and save.

💥 Reset

There might be a situation where you want to destroy your Kubernetes cluster. The following command will reset your nodes back to maintenance mode, append --force to completely format your the Talos installation. Either way the nodes should reboot after the command has sucessfully ran.

task talos:reset # --force

🛠️ Talos and Kubernetes Maintenance

⚙️ Updating Talos node configuration

Important

Ensure you have updated talconfig.yaml and any patches with your updated configuration. In some cases you not only need to apply the configuration but also upgrade talos to apply new configuration.

# (Re)generate the Talos config
task talos:generate-config
# Apply the config to the node
task talos:apply-node IP=? MODE=?
# e.g. task talos:apply-node IP=10.10.10.10 MODE=auto

⬆️ Updating Talos and Kubernetes versions

Important

Ensure the talosVersion and kubernetesVersion in talconfig.yaml are up-to-date with the version you wish to upgrade to.

# Upgrade node to a newer Talos version
task talos:upgrade-node IP=?
# e.g. task talos:upgrade-node IP=10.10.10.10

# Upgrade cluster to a newer Kubernetes version
task talos:upgrade-k8s
# e.g. task talos:upgrade-k8s

🤖 Renovate

Renovate is a tool that automates dependency management. It is designed to scan your repository around the clock and open PRs for out-of-date dependencies it finds. Common dependencies it can discover are Helm charts, container images, GitHub Actions, Ansible roles... even Flux itself! Merging a PR will cause Flux to apply the update to your cluster.

To enable Renovate, click the 'Configure' button over at their Github app page and select your repository. Renovate creates a "Dependency Dashboard" as an issue in your repository, giving an overview of the status of all updates. The dashboard has interactive checkboxes that let you do things like advance scheduling or reattempt update PRs you closed without merging.

The base Renovate configuration in your repository can be viewed at .github/renovate.json5. By default it is scheduled to be active with PRs every weekend, but you can change the schedule to anything you want, or remove it if you want Renovate to open PRs right away.

🐛 Debugging

Below is a general guide on trying to debug an issue with an resource or application. For example, if a workload/resource is not showing up or a pod has started but in a CrashLoopBackOff or Pending state. Most of these steps do not include a way to fix the problem as the problem could be one of many different things.

Verify the Git Repository is up-to-date and in a ready state.
```
flux get sources git -A
```
Force Flux to sync your repository to your cluster:
```
flux -n flux-system reconcile ks flux-system --with-source
```
Verify all the Flux kustomizations are up-to-date and in a ready state.
```
flux get ks -A
```
Verify all the Flux helm releases are up-to-date and in a ready state.
```
flux get hr -A
```
Do you see the pod of the workload you are debugging?
```
kubectl -n <namespace> get pods -o wide
```

Check the logs of the pod if its there.

kubectl -n <namespace> logs <pod-name> -f

If a resource exists try to describe it to see what problems it might have.
```
kubectl -n <namespace> describe <resource> <name>
```

Check the namespace events

kubectl -n <namespace> get events --sort-by='.metadata.creationTimestamp'

Resolving problems that you have could take some tweaking of your YAML manifests in order to get things working, other times it could be a external factor like permissions on a NFS server. If you are unable to figure out your problem see the support sections below.

🧹 Tidy up

Once your cluster is fully configured and you no longer need to run task configure, it's a good idea to clean up the repository by removing the templates directory and any files related to the templating process. This will help eliminate unnecessary clutter from the upstream template repository and resolve any "duplicate registry" warnings from Renovate.

Tidy up your repository:
```
task template:tidy
```

Push your changes to git:

git add -A
git commit -m "chore: tidy up :broom:"
git push

👉 Community Support

Make a post in this repository's Github Discussions.
Start a thread in the #support or #cluster-template channels in the Home Operations Discord server.

🙋 GitHub Sponsors Support

If you're having difficulty with this project, can't find the answers you need through the community support options above, or simply want to show your appreciation while gaining deeper insights, I’m offering one-on-one paid support through GitHub Sponsors for a limited time. Payment and scheduling will be coordinated through GitHub Sponsors.

Click to expand the details

Rate: $50/hour (no longer than 2 hours / day).
What’s Included: Assistance with deployment, debugging, or answering questions related to this project.
What to Expect:
1. Sessions will focus on specific questions or issues you are facing.
2. I will provide guidance, explanations, and actionable steps to help resolve your concerns.
3. Support is limited to this project and does not extend to unrelated tools or custom feature development.

❔ What's next

The cluster is your oyster (or something like that). Below are some optional considerations you might want to review.

DNS

Instead of using k8s_gateway to provide DNS for your applications you might want to check out external-dns, it has wide support for many different providers such as Pi-hole, UniFi, Adguard Home, Bind and more.

Storage

You might find you need persistent storage for your workloads with features like replicated storage or to connect to a NFS/SMB/iSCSI server. If you need any of those features be sure to check out the projects like rook-ceph, longhorn, openebs, democratic-csi, csi-driver-nfs, csi-driver-smb or synology-csi.

Community Repositories

Community member @whazor created Kubesearch to allow searching Flux HelmReleases across Github and Gitlab repositories with the kubesearch topic.

🙌 Related Projects

If this repo is too hot to handle or too cold to hold check out these following projects.

ajaykumar4/cluster-template - A template for deploying a Talos Kubernetes cluster including Argo for GitOps
khuedoan/homelab - Fully automated homelab from empty disk to running services with a single command.
ricsanfre/pi-cluster - Pi Kubernetes Cluster. Homelab kubernetes cluster automated with Ansible and FluxCD
techno-tim/k3s-ansible - The easiest way to bootstrap a self-hosted High Availability Kubernetes cluster. A fully automated HA k3s etcd install with kube-vip, MetalLB, and more. Build. Destroy. Repeat.

⭐ Stargazers

🤝 Thanks

Big shout out to all the contributors, sponsors and everyone else who has helped on this project.

License

TheTechNetwork/SingleNode

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