Preface

To automate deployment of different components inside Kubernetes cluster Ansible can be used with a help of k8s and helm modules. I’ve created home-kube repository for Ansible playbook to manage all components which I use in my home kubernetes cluster.

home-kube

This Ansible playbook deploy the following k3s components which are described in details in the blog:

  • MetalLB
  • NFS-Client
  • Pihole
  • Prometheus & Grafana (as stack)
  • Plex

MetalLB is used as main LoadBalancer for all services. For Pihole ip-address should be specified, for all other services (Prometheus, Grafana and Plex) ip-addresses will be taken from defined default MetalLB pool.

For Plex nfs_server_ip:plex_nfs_data_path will be added to /etc/fstab on all nodes and mounted locally to plex_local_data_path.

Helm should be installed on first defined master manually as per official guide before to proceed further. For some reason helm is still not available for Raspbian OS from apt, so I installed it from script.

Before to run hosts.ini should be defined as example:

[master]
192.168.1.21
192.168.1.22
192.168.1.23

[node]
192.168.1.24

[k3s_cluster:children]
master
node

[k3s_cluster:vars]
ansible_ssh_user=vagrant
metallb_ip_range="192.168.1.2-192.168.1.10"
pihole_ip="192.168.8.11"
nfs_server_ip="192.168.8.20"
nfs_server_path="/mnt/kubcluster"
snmp_target_ip="192.168.8.1"
plex_nfs_data_path="/volume/data"
plex_local_data_path="/mnt/data"
plex_claim_token="claim-ne3xhadLMsxRpy4567890"
plex_timezone="Europe/Vilnius"

All Kubernetes actions are performed to first defined master, so please ensure it’s accessible and working fine.

Example of usage

ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini home-kube.yml

Remove all roles

ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini reset.yml

Important moments

  1. Helm will install the latest version of charts each time when playbook will be run, so if you want to stick with specific version of some component it should be specified in required role.

  2. When playbook is executed for the first time on Raspberry Pi cluster installation of some components (like kube-prometheus-stack) may take minutes and sometimes it returns errors due to timeout. So it’s recommended to use tags to control running of each individual role, like:

    ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini --tags pihole home-kube.yml