Setup a Local Kind Cluster

This document walks through setting up a local Kind cluster. There are many examples of how to do this online but the intention of this document is so that when writing future ToolHive content, we can refer back to this guide when needing to setup a local Kind cluster without polluting future content with the additional steps.

Prerequisites

• Local container runtime is installed (Docker, Podman etc)
• Kind is installed
• Optional: Task to run automated steps with a cloned copy of the ToolHive repository (git clone https://github.com/stacklok/toolhive)

TL;DR

To setup a local Kind Cluster using Task, clone the ToolHive repo and run the below.

Setup

task kind-setup

This will create a single node Kind cluster and it will output the kubeconfig into the kconfig.yaml file. This file is added to the .gitignore of this repository, so there is no worry about checking it in.

Destroy

To destroy a local Kind cluster using Task, run:

task kind-destroy

This will destroy the Kind cluster, as well as removing the kconfig.yaml kubeconfig file.

Manual Setup: Setup & Destroy a Local Kind Cluster

You can perform Kind operations manually by following the sections below.

Setup

To setup a Local Kind Cluster manually, run:

kind create cluster --name toolhive

Getting Kind Config

We recommend having a dedicated kubeconfig file to keep things isolated from your other cluster configs (even though Kind adds it to ~/.kube/config automatically).

To do this, run:

kind get kubeconfig --name toolhive > kconfig.yaml

This will output the kind cluster config to a file called kconfig.yaml in the directory of which the command is ran in. This file is added to the .gitignore of this repository, so there is no worry about checking it in.

Destroy

To destroy a local Kind cluster, run:

kind delete clusters toolhive