Quickstart with Vagrant on your PC

Follow these steps to quickly deploy the KAT example. You will need a PC with at least 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM to run KAT locally in a VM that Hashicorp's Vagrant will setup on your PC; if you don't have such a machine then please use a cloud provider to rent a VM. We provide instructions for this alternative approach here.

1. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/BigBitBusInc/kubernetes-automation-toolkit.git

2. Install Vagrant for your OS (Vagrant supports Windows, Linux and MacOS); you may also need to install the hypervisor software and a vagrant plugin for this hypervisor on your platform; We have guidelines on how to setup Vagrant on your PC.

3. Navigate to the root directory of the KAT repository and enter this command in a terminal

cd kubernetes-automation-toolkit
vagrant up

Please be patient, even on a fast Internet connection remember we are downloading and installing over 2GB of OS, Kubernetes, docker images etc.

Vagrant's output will include the kubeconfig for the Kubernetes cluster created within the VM, you can use the security token in this output to connect to the Kubernetes dashboard.

3. You can now open a web-browser and reach these end-points:

• Todo application Vuejs Frontend http://localhost:8080/frontend/ Learn more
• Todo application browsable API http://localhost:8080/djangoapi/apis/v1/ Learn more
• Kubernetes Dashboard http://localhost:8080/dashboard/ Learn more (Access token is printed in the Vagrant output as mentioned above).
• Grafana Monitoring http://localhost:8080/monitoring-grafana/ Learn more (default credentials: admin/prom-operator)

4. Get the ssh-configuration snippet for your Vagrant VM and add it to your ~/.ssh/config file; these commands will do this:

#For Linux and Mac you could run
vagrant ssh-config >> ~/.ssh/config

# For Windows
vagrant ssh-config >> ~\.ssh\config

Confirm that you can now log into the Vagrant VM by simply typing vagrant ssh on the commandline while in the same directory as the Vagrantfile that created the VM - in our case this is the root directory of the KAT repository.

5. Once you are logged into the VM there are many things you can do, such as

• Launch k9s from the terminal and surf your Kubernetes cluster and all its objects.
• If you prefer using the official Kubernetes CLI then read the kubectl cheat-sheet here.
• Access the KAT installation logs in the /var/log directory.

6. Head over to our documentation to learn the concepts and start understanding the code behind the components..

The next steps are optional but very useful if you are planning to get productive as a developer

7. We assume you use the Microsoft VS Code Editor in this tutorial, please install the Remote - SSH plugin. This will allow us to browse and control the Vagrant VM via SSH from within VS Code.

8. Open VS Code and configure it to connect remotely to the Vagrant VM. Load up the KAT code in the home directory of the Vagrant user. Tweak it, break it, fix it and choose whether this way of development will work for you!

Pitfalls and Troubleshooting

1. If you run vagrant suspend and then vagrant reload between putting your PC to sleep then you may find that Microk8s does not start within the VM. Log into the VM and type microk8s start to get back on track.
2. Vagrant setups up port-forwarding for you, but you can also setup port-forwarding using ssh; along the lines of

ssh vagrant-vm-name-in-ssh-config -L 8080:localhost:80 -N

For Windows you can look at some of the screenshots in this file to get an idea of how to set ssh port-forwarding with Putty.

Here are links to some useful documentation of different tools that are used in the KAT example.

Tool	Useful Documentation
Microk8s Kubernetes Cluster	Microk8s
Kubectl Kubernetes Command Line Tool	Kubectl
K9s Terminal Based Kubernetes UI	k9s
Helm Kubernetes Package Manager	Helm
Skaffold Kubernetes Develop/Deploy Tool	Skaffold
Vagrant virtual machine workflow automation	Vagrant

Cleanup

To destroy the Vagrant VM, open a terminal and go to the kubernetes-automation-toolkit (root directory of the git repository where the Vagrantfile lives) and simply type

vagrant destroy

Useful Vagrant Commands

Vagrant	Cmd
Start Vagrant Environment	vagrant up
Connect to Vagrant via SSH	vagrant ssh
Stop Vagrant Machine	vagrant halt
Resume Vagrant Machine	vagrant resume
Suspend Virtual Machine	vagrant suspend
List Installed Boxes	vagrant box list
Delete Vagrant Machine	vagrant destroy

This link lists some useful Vagrant commands.