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Creating a MicroK8s cluster#

Follow the instructions below to set up a MicroK8s instance from scratch, including all the necessary dependencies and configurations.

MicroK8s is a lightweight, fully conformant, single-package Kubernetes developed by Canonical. The project is publicly available on GitHub.

1. Prepare your environment#

Prepare your environment to set up the MicroK8s instance.

The next steps assume that you're starting from a clean install of Ubuntu Server and require that you run commands on a local or remote command line session on the machine.

2. Installing MicroK8s#

Install MicroK8s on the machine:

  1. Make sure that the package nfs-common is installed:

    sudo apt update && sudo apt install nfs-common -y

  2. Install MicroK8s from the 1.19/stable channel:

    sudo snap install microk8s --classic --channel=1.19/stable
sudo usermod -a -G microk8s $USER
sudo su - $USER

  3. Check that MicroK8s is running:

    microk8s.status --wait-ready

  4. If you're running MicroK8s using a single node, disable high-availability clustering for improved performance:

    microk8s.disable ha-cluster

3. Configuring MicroK8s#

Now that MicroK8s is running on the machine we can proceed to enabling the necessary addons:

  1. Configure MicroK8s to allow privileged containers:

    sudo mkdir -p /var/snap/microk8s/current/args
sudo echo "--allow-privileged=true" >> /var/snap/microk8s/current/args/kube-apiserver
microk8s.status --wait-ready

  2. Enable the following MicroK8s addons:

    microk8s.enable dns
microk8s.status --wait-ready
microk8s.enable storage
microk8s.status --wait-ready
microk8s.enable ingress
microk8s.status --wait-ready

    Important

    Check the output of the commands to make sure that all the addons are enabled correctly.

    If by chance any of the addons fails to be enabled, re-execute the microk8s.enable command for that addon.

  3. Restart MicroK8s and its services to make sure that all configurations are working:

    microk8s.stop
microk8s.start
microk8s.status --wait-ready

  4. Export your kubeconfig so that Helm knows on which cluster to install the charts:

    microk8s.config > ~/.kube/config

  5. The addons are now enabled and the MicroK8s instance bootstrapped. However, we must wait for some MicroK8s pods to be ready, as failing to do so can result in the pods entering a CrashLoopBackoff state:

    microk8s.kubectl wait -n kube-system --for=condition=Ready pod -l k8s-app=kube-dns
microk8s.kubectl wait -n kube-system --for=condition=Ready pod -l k8s-app=hostpath-provisioner
# If the following command fails, you probably installed the wrong MicroK8s version
microk8s.kubectl wait --all-namespaces --for=condition=Ready pod -l name=nginx-ingress-microk8s

  6. Verify that the MicroK8s configuration was successful:

    microk8s.status --wait-ready

    The output of the command should be the following:

    microk8s is running
addons:
knative: disabled
jaeger: disabled
fluentd: disabled
gpu: disabled
cilium: disabled
storage: enabled
registry: disabled
rbac: disabled
ingress: enabled
dns: enabled
metrics-server: disabled
linkerd: disabled
prometheus: disabled
istio: disabled
dashboard: disabled

After these steps you have ensured that DNS, HTTP, and NGINX Ingress are enabled and working properly inside the MicroK8s instance.

Notes on installing Codacy#

You can now follow the generic Codacy installation instructions but please note the following:

  • You must execute all kubectl commands as microk8s.kubectl commands instead.

    To simplify this, we suggest that you create an alias so that you can run the commands directly as provided on the instructions:

    alias kubectl=microk8s.kubectl

  • When running the helm upgrade command that installs the Codacy chart, you will be instructed to also use the file values-microk8s.yaml that downsizes some component limits, making it easier to fit Codacy in the lightweight MicroK8s solution.

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Last modified June 22, 2023