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Deploying Gardener locally

This document will walk you through deploying Gardener on your local machine. If you encounter difficulties, please open an issue so that we can make this process easier.

Gardener runs in any Kubernetes cluster. In this guide, we will start a KinD cluster which is used as both garden and seed cluster (please refer to the architecture overview) for simplicity.

Based on Skaffold, the container images for all required components will be built and deployed into the cluster (via their Helm charts).

Architecture Diagram

Prerequisites

  • Make sure that you have followed the Local Setup guide up until the Get the sources step.
  • Make sure your Docker daemon is up-to-date, up and running and has enough resources (at least 8 CPUs and 8Gi memory; see here how to configure the resources for Docker for Mac).

    Please note that 8 CPU / 8Gi memory might not be enough for more than two Shoot clusters, i.e., you might need to increase these values if you want to run additional Shoots. If you plan on following the optional steps to create a second seed cluster, the required resources will be more - at least 10 CPUs and 18Gi memory. Additionally, please configure at least 120Gi of disk size for the Docker daemon. Tip: With docker system df and docker system prune -a you can cleanup unused data.

Setting up the KinD cluster (garden and seed)

make kind-up

This command sets up a new KinD cluster named gardener-local and stores the kubeconfig in the ./example/gardener-local/kind/kubeconfig file.

It might be helpful to copy this file to $HOME/.kube/config since you will need to target this KinD cluster multiple times. Alternatively, make sure to set your KUBECONFIG environment variable to ./example/gardener-local/kind/kubeconfig for all future steps via export KUBECONFIG=example/gardener-local/kind/kubeconfig.

All following steps assume that your are using this kubeconfig.

Setting up Gardener

make gardener-up

This will first build the images based (which might take a bit if you do it for the first time). Afterwards, the Gardener resources will be deployed into the cluster.

Creating a Shoot cluster

You can wait for the Seed to be ready by running

kubectl wait --for=condition=gardenletready --for=condition=extensionsready --for=condition=bootstrapped seed local --timeout=5m

Alternatively, you can run kubectl get seed local and wait for the STATUS to indicate readiness:

NAME    STATUS   PROVIDER   REGION   AGE     VERSION       K8S VERSION
local   Ready    local      local    4m42s   vX.Y.Z-dev    v1.21.1

In order to create a first shoot cluster, just run

kubectl apply -f example/provider-local/shoot.yaml

You can wait for the Shoot to be ready by running

kubectl wait --for=condition=apiserveravailable --for=condition=controlplanehealthy --for=condition=everynodeready --for=condition=systemcomponentshealthy shoot local -n garden-local --timeout=10m

Alternatively, you can run kubectl -n garden-local get shoot local and wait for the LAST OPERATION to reach 100%:

NAME    CLOUDPROFILE   PROVIDER   REGION   K8S VERSION   HIBERNATION   LAST OPERATION            STATUS    AGE
local   local          local      local    1.21.0        Awake         Create Processing (43%)   healthy   94s

(Optional): You could also execute a simple e2e test (creating and deleting a shoot) by running

make test-e2e-local-simple KUBECONFIG="$PWD/example/gardener-local/kind/kubeconfig"

Accessing the Shoot cluster

⚠️ Please note that in this setup shoot clusters are not accessible by default when you download the kubeconfig and try to communicate with them. The reason is that your host most probably cannot resolve the DNS names of the clusters since provider-local extension runs inside the KinD cluster (see this for more details). Hence, if you want to access the shoot cluster, you have to run the following command which will extend your /etc/hosts file with the required information to make the DNS names resolvable:

cat <<EOF | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

# Manually created to access local Gardener shoot clusters with names 'local' or 'e2e-default' in the 'garden-local' namespace.
# TODO: Remove this again when the shoot cluster access is no longer required.
127.0.0.1 api.local.local.external.local.gardener.cloud
127.0.0.1 api.local.local.internal.local.gardener.cloud
127.0.0.1 api.e2e-default.local.external.local.gardener.cloud
127.0.0.1 api.e2e-default.local.internal.local.gardener.cloud
EOF

Now you can access it by running

kubectl -n garden-local get secret local.kubeconfig -o jsonpath={.data.kubeconfig} | base64 -d > /tmp/kubeconfig-shoot-local.yaml
kubectl --kubeconfig=/tmp/kubeconfig-shoot-local.yaml get nodes

(Optional): Setting up a second seed cluster

There are cases where you would want to create a second cluster seed in your local setup. For example, if you want to test the control plane migration feature. The following steps describe how to do that.

make kind2-up

This command sets up a new KinD cluster named gardener-local2 and stores its kubeconfig in the ./example/gardener-local/kind2/kubeconfig file.

In order to deploy required resources in the KinD cluster that you just created, run:

make gardenlet-kind2-up

The following steps assume that your are using the kubeconfig that points to the gardener-local cluster (first KinD cluster): export KUBECONFIG=example/gardener-local/kind/kubeconfig.

You can wait for the local2 Seed to be ready by running:

kubectl wait --for=condition=gardenletready --for=condition=extensionsready --for=condition=bootstrapped seed local2 --timeout=5m

Alternatively, you can run kubectl get seed local2 and wait for the STATUS to indicate readiness:

NAME    STATUS   PROVIDER   REGION   AGE     VERSION       K8S VERSION
local2  Ready    local      local    4m42s   vX.Y.Z-dev    v1.21.1

If you want to perform control plane migration you can follow the steps outlined here to migrate the shoot cluster to the second seed you just created.

Deleting the Shoot cluster

./hack/usage/delete shoot local garden-local

(Optional): Tear down the second seed cluster

make kind2-down

Tear down the Gardener environment

make kind-down

Further reading

This setup makes use of the local provider extension. You can read more about it in this document.