Installing K3s with Ansible

This covers deploying K3s across your VMs using Ansible. We’re using a fork of TechnoTim’s k3s-ansible repo.

Prerequisites

Install Ansible on your management machine:

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y ansible

macOS:

brew install ansible

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/meroxdotdev/k3s-ansible

Configuration

cd k3s-ansible
cp ansible.example.cfg ansible.cfg
ansible-galaxy install -r ./collections/requirements.yml
cp -R inventory/sample inventory/my-cluster

inventory/my-cluster/hosts.ini — set your node IPs:

1
[master]
2
10.57.57.30
3
10.57.57.31
4
10.57.57.32
5

6
[node]
7
10.57.57.33
8
10.57.57.34
9
10.57.57.35
10

11
[k3s_cluster:children]
12
master
13
node

inventory/my-cluster/group_vars/all.yml — key fields to edit:

• ansible_user: default VM user is ubuntu
• system_timezone: set to your timezone, e.g. Europe/Bucharest
• Networking: comment out #flannel_iface: eth0 and use calico_iface: "eth0" for better network policies. Flannel works too if you want something simpler.
• apiserver_endpoint: 10.57.57.100 — an unused IP on your LAN, acts as the VIP for the K3s control plane
• k3s_token: any alphanumeric string
• metal_lb_ip_range: 10.57.57.80-10.57.57.90 — a range on your LAN, outside your DHCP pool, not used by anything else. This is how K3s services get exposed to your network.

Deploy

ansible-playbook ./site.yml -i ./inventory/my-cluster/hosts.ini

Once done, pull the kubeconfig and verify:

scp ubuntu@10.57.57.30:~/.kube/config .
mkdir -p ~/.kube
mv config ~/.kube/
kubectl get nodes

Next Steps

Proceed to the Traefik Setup guide.