Telemetry Development Environment

Since Telemetry gets its data from Rancher and Rancher requires a Kubernetes Cluster to run (and to be able to provide any telemetry data), the development environment spins up a local Kubernetes Cluster. It does so using k3d.

k3d is a lightweight wrapper to run k3s (Rancher Lab’s minimal Kubernetes distribution) in docker.

k3d makes it very easy to create single- and multi-node k3s clusters in docker, e.g. for local development on Kubernetes.

Requirements

• k3d (requires docker)
• helm

Quick Start

./start

Then visit https://rancher/. The username is admin, the password is dev-admin-pw.

pgAdmin is installed and configured alongside PostgreSQL. You can reach the web interface using https://rancher:8080/. The username is admin@local.host and the password is admin.

If you want to connect to PostgreSQL using external tools, you can do so using rancher:5432 on the host system.

What's being deployed?

By running start, a bunch of things happen:

• A k3d cluster is deployed
• Rancher and dependencies are installed
• The hostname rancher is configured
• A login token is created and retrieved
• The login token is used to create an API token
• The Rancher server URL is configured
• Postgresql is installed
• InfluxDB is installed

NOTE: The development cluster is destroyed and recreated without requiring a confirmation if start is rerun.

Can I just install the base system?

Yes! The base system is defined as k3d with Rancher. What's not installed is PostgreSQL or InfluxDB.

To install the base system, you can source start and run install-base:

source start && install-base

Can I run some steps manually?

Yes! The way to do that is by sourcing the start script. Then all the functions defined in that script, that are executed if the script is run, can be called manually.

source start
# then, for example, run
postgres-install
# or
configure-hostnames
# or
api_token=$(create-api-key $(get-login-token))

NOTE: If you don't run change-password, the bootstrap password will still be admin and you will be shown the setup-screen.

Can I automate importing data?

PostgreSQL data is persisted on the host system in /var/lib/postgresql/data. The script start ensures it is created and available. It also makes it available to the k3d nodes, so that it can be used as volume for containers created on that nodes.

SQL instructions can be placed as files in /var/lib/postgresql/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d. They will be executed on first start of the PostgreSQL container. If the database has been initialized once, the SQL files in that folder will be ignored.

Can I import container images from my host system?

Yes, k3d allows to import container images from the host using the following command. Note that the container images are copied into clusters, which means they will be available on all nodes of said cluster.

k3d image import -c <cluster-name> <image-path:tag>