Installing Cluster API Operator

Installing Cluster API Operator by following this page (without it being a Helm dependency to Rancher Turtles) is not a recommended installation method and intended only for local development purposes.

This section describes how to install Cluster API Operator in the Kubernetes cluster.

Installing Cluster API (CAPI) and providers

CAPI and desired CAPI providers could be installed using the helm-based installation for Cluster API Operator or as a helm dependency for the Rancher Turtles.

Install manually with Helm (alternative)

To install Cluster API Operator with version 1.7.3 of the CAPI + Docker provider using helm, follow these steps:

  1. Add the Helm repository for the Cluster API Operator:

    helm repo add capi-operator https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/cluster-api-operator
helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io

  2. Update the Helm repository:

    helm repo update

  3. Install the Cert-Manager:

    helm install cert-manager jetstack/cert-manager --namespace cert-manager --create-namespace --set installCRDs=true

  4. Install the Cluster API Operator:

    helm install capi-operator capi-operator/cluster-api-operator
 --create-namespace -n capi-operator-system
 --set infrastructure=docker:v1.7.7
 --set core=cluster-api:v1.7.7
 --timeout 90s --wait # Core Cluster API with kubeadm bootstrap and control plane providers will also be installed

cert-manager is a hard requirement for CAPI and Cluster API Operator*

To provide additional environment variables, enable feature gates, or supply cloud credentials, similar to clusterctl common provider, variables secret with name and a namespace of the secret could be specified for the Cluster API Operator as shown below.

helm install capi-operator capi-operator/cluster-api-operator
	--create-namespace -n capi-operator-system
	--set infrastructure=docker:v1.7.7
	--set core=cluster-api:v1.7.7
	--timeout 90s
	--secret-name <secret_name>
	--wait

Example secret data:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: variables
  namespace: default
type: Opaque
stringData:
  CLUSTER_TOPOLOGY: "true"
  EXP_CLUSTER_RESOURCE_SET: "true"

To select more than one desired provider to be installed together with the Cluster API Operator, the --infrastructure flag can be specified with multiple provider names separated by a comma. For example:

helm install ... --set infrastructure="docker:v1.7.7;aws:v2.6.1"

The infrastructure flag is set to docker:v1.7.7;aws:v2.6.1, representing the desired provider names. This means that the Cluster API Operator will install and manage multiple providers, Docker and AWS, with versions v1.7.7 and v2.6.1 respectively.

The cluster is now ready to install Rancher Turtles. The default behavior when installing the chart is to install Cluster API Operator as a Helm dependency. Since we decided to install it manually before installing Rancher Turtles, the feature cluster-api-operator.enabled must be explicitly disabled as otherwise it would conflict with the existing installation. You can refer to Install Rancher Turtles without Cluster API Operator to see next steps.

For more fine-grained control of the providers and other components installed with CAPI, see the Add the infrastructure provider section.

Install Rancher Turtles without Cluster API Operator as a Helm dependency

This option is only suitable for development purposes and not recommended for production environments.

The rancher-turtles chart is available in https://rancher.github.io/turtles and this Helm repository must be added before proceeding with the installation:

helm repo add turtles https://rancher.github.io/turtles
helm repo update

and then it can be installed into the rancher-turtles-system namespace with:

helm install rancher-turtles turtles/rancher-turtles --version v0.13.0
    -n rancher-turtles-system
    --set cluster-api-operator.enabled=false
    --set cluster-api-operator.cluster-api.enabled=false
    --create-namespace --wait
    --dependency-update

As you can see, we are telling Helm to ignore installing cluster-api-operator as a dependency.