Developer Guide

Pieces of Cluster API

Cluster API is made up of many components, all of which need to be running for correct operation. For example, if you wanted to use Cluster API with AWS, you’d need to install both the cluster-api manager and the aws manager.

Cluster API includes a built-in provisioner, Docker, that’s suitable for using for testing and development. This guide will walk you through getting that daemon, known as CAPD, up and running.

Other providers may have additional steps you need to follow to get up and running.

Prerequisites

Docker

Iterating on the cluster API involves repeatedly building Docker containers. You’ll need the docker daemon v19.03 or newer available.

A Cluster

You’ll likely want an existing cluster as your management cluster. The easiest way to do this is with kind v0.9 or newer, as explained in the quick start.

Make sure your cluster is set as the default for kubectl. If it’s not, you will need to modify subsequent kubectl commands below.

A container registry

If you’re using kind, you’ll need a way to push your images to a registry so they can be pulled. You can instead side-load all images, but the registry workflow is lower-friction.

Most users test with GCR, but you could also use something like Docker Hub. If you choose not to use GCR, you’ll need to set the REGISTRY environment variable.

Kustomize

You’ll need to install kustomize. There is a version of kustomize built into kubectl, but it does not have all the features of kustomize v3 and will not work.

Kubebuilder

You’ll need to install kubebuilder.

Envsubst

You’ll need envsubst or similar to handle clusterctl var replacement. Note: drone/envsubst releases v1.0.2 and earlier do not have the binary packaged under cmd/envsubst. It is available in Go pseudo-version v1.0.3-0.20200709231038-aa43e1c1a629

We provide a make target to generate the envsubst binary if desired. See the provider contract for more details about how clusterctl uses variables.

make envsubst

The generated binary can be found at ./hack/tools/bin/envsubst

Cert-Manager

You’ll need to deploy cert-manager components on your management cluster, using kubectl

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.4/cert-manager.yaml

Ensure the cert-manager webhook service is ready before creating the Cluster API components.

This can be done by following instructions for manual verification from the cert-manager web site. Note: make sure to follow instructions for the release of cert-manager you are installing.

Development

Option 1: Tilt

Tilt is a tool for quickly building, pushing, and reloading Docker containers as part of a Kubernetes deployment. Many of the Cluster API engineers use it for quick iteration. Please see our Tilt instructions to get started.

Option 2: The Old-fashioned way

# Build all the images
make docker-build

# Push images
make docker-push

# Apply the manifests
kustomize build config/default | ./hack/tools/bin/envsubst | kubectl apply -f -
kustomize build bootstrap/kubeadm/config/default | ./hack/tools/bin/envsubst | kubectl apply -f -
kustomize build controlplane/kubeadm/config/default | ./hack/tools/bin/envsubst | kubectl apply -f -
kustomize build test/infrastructure/docker/config/default | ./hack/tools/bin/envsubst | kubectl apply -f -

Testing

Cluster API has a number of test suites available for you to run. Please visit the testing page for more information on each suite.

That’s it!

Now you can create CAPI objects! To test another iteration, you’ll need to follow the steps to build, push, update the manifests, and apply.

Videos explaining CAPI architecture and code walkthroughs

CAPI components and architecture

Additional ClusterAPI KubeCon talks

Tutorials

Code walkthroughs

Let’s chat about ...

We are currently hosting “Let’s chat about ...” sessions where we are talking about topics relevant to contributors and users of the Cluster API project. For more details and an up-to-date list of recordings of past sessions please see Let’s chat about ....