Skip to main content
Version: 2.2
k3d logo

Local Platform Installation

kubefirst is the name of our CLI that installs the platform of the same name to your local or cloud environment.

Prerequisites​

Local Prerequisites​

If you are on macOS, and have Homebrew installed, you can run:

brew install konstructio/taps/kubefirst

To upgrade an existing kubefirst CLI to the latest version run:

brew update
brew upgrade kubefirst

There are other ways to install kubefirst for different operating systems, architectures, and containerized environments. See our installation README for details.

Docker Desktop​

Install Docker Desktop.

GitHub​

Create or use an actual GitHub personal account

Install the CA (Certificate Authority) of mkcert in your trusted store​

We use mkcert to generate local certificates and serve https with the Traefik Ingress Controller. During the installation, kubefirst generates these certificates and pushes them to Kubernetes as secrets to attach to Ingress resources.

To allow the applications running in your kubefirst platform in addition to your browser to trust the certificates generated by your kubefirst local install, you need to install the CA (Certificate Authority) of mkcert in your trusted store. To do so, follow these simple steps:

brew install mkcert
mkcert -install

This is not an optional step: the cluster creation will fail if you don't install the mkcert CA in your trusted store.

Create your new local cluster​

To create a new kubefirst cluster locally, run

kubefirst k3d create

Details about your execution will be logged to your ~/.k1/logs directory. More information on kubefirst k3d, including optional flags, can be discovered by running kubefirst k3d help.

We are able to create an ephemeral GitHub token that expires after 8 hours using a process that will prompt your browser to request access to your account. If you need a quick environment, this is a frictionless approach. However, if you need this environment for longer than 8 hours, which is probably the case, please follow our GitHub Token Guide and export a more permanent token to your terminal by using the following command:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_xxxxxxxx

When Docker is provided 5 GB of memory and 5 CPUs, the local kubefirst platform will provision in about 6 minutes and deprovision in about 1 minute.

Installed Applications​

To see what is installed by kubefirst, check the overview page.

After installation​

After the ~5 minute installation, your browser will open a new browser tab at completion with the Console UI at https://kubefirst.kubefirst.dev to provide you an easy way to navigate through the different services that were provisioned.

Console UI Screen​

kubefirst console screen

Example of terminal output following cluster creation​

terminal handoff

Root credentials​

To obtain your 3 initial passwords, run

kubefirst k3d root-credentials

terminal handoff

Connecting to Kubernetes​

You will be automatically connected to your new Kubernetes cluster. To view all cluster pods, run

kubectl get pods -A