Kind Cheatsheet

Kind

Using the Kind project, you are able to easily deploy a Kubernetes cluster on top of Docker as Docker containers. Kind will spawn separate containers which be shown as the Kubernetes nodes. In this documentation, you can find some examples, as well as a link to a Ansible playbook which can do the cluster creation / deletion for you. This document only describes the basics of Kind. To find more detailed information, you can check the official Kind documentation.

Kind is ideal to use in a local development environment or even during a build pipeline run.

Installation on Linux

Since Kind deploys Docker containers, it needs to have a Container engine (like Docker) installed.

Installing Kind can be done by downloading the latest available release / binary for your platform:

1curl -Lo ./kind https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/dl/v0.16.0/kind-linux-amd64
2chmod +x ./kind
3sudo mv ./kind /usr/local/bin/kind

Cluster management

Cluster creation

You have to provide a configuration file which tells Kind how you want your Kubernetes cluster to be deployed. Find an example configuration file below:

 1kind: Cluster
 2apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
 3name: testcluster
 4# 1 control plane node and 2 workers
 5nodes:
 6# the control plane node config
 7- role: control-plane
 8# the two workers
 9- role: worker
10- role: worker

Create the cluster by the following command:

 1kind create cluster --config kind-cluster-config.yaml
 2Creating cluster "testcluster" ...
 3Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.25.2)
 4Preparing nodes
 5Writing configuration
 6Starting control-plane
 7Installing CNI
 8Installing StorageClass
 9Joining worker nodes
10
11Set kubectl context to "kind-testcluster"
12You can now use your cluster with:
13kubectl cluster-info --context kind-testcluster
14
15Not sure what to do next? Check out https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/quick-start/

Checking for Docker containers running, you can see the following:

1docker ps -a
2
3CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
4ac14d8c7a3c9 kindest/node:v1.25.2 "/usr/local/bin/entr..." 2 minutes ago Up About a minute testcluster-worker2
5096dd4bf1718 kindest/node:v1.25.2 "/usr/local/bin/entr..." 2 minutes ago Up About a minute 127.0.0.1:42319->6443/tcp testcluster-control-plane
6e1ae2d701394 kindest/node:v1.25.2 "/usr/local/bin/entr..." 2 minutes ago Up About a minute testcluster-worker

Interacting with your cluster

You may have multiple Kind clusters deployed at the same time. To get a list of running clusters, you can use the following command:

1kind get clusters
2kind
3kind-2

After cluster creation, the Kubernetes context is set automatically to the newly created cluster. In order to set the currently used kubeconfig, you may use some tooling like kubectx. You may also set the current context used by kubectl with the --context option, which refers to the Kind cluster name.

Cluster deletion

To delete a Kind cluster, you can use the following command. Kind will also delete the kubeconfig of the deleted cluster. So you don't need to do this on your own.

1kind delete cluster -n testcluster
2Deleting cluster "testcluster" ...

Further information

More examples and tutorials regarding Proxmox can be found in the link list below: