raspi

Mono repo containing microservices/components that are meant to be deployed to k3s cluster setup on my own Raspberry Pi 5. Everything is suited here to run on ARM architecture. If you wish to use that project in your own different environment, you'll have to change it accordingly. Considerations are covered in Other Platforms section.

Background

Project started with the idea of having a way of deploying applications for my personal use and being able to connect them to database, without reliance on SaaS or other subscription based systems, that come with the cost of regular monthly fees regardless of usage, or unpredictable and risky payment plans. At the same time I wanted a way to bring convienence in terms of maintenance in the long run that could be brought by Kubernetes and Helm. I also wanted being able to learn them by being exposed to different category of problems than I face at my full-time job - a Developer who only slighly works in DevOps territory. Above led me to purchase of Raspberry Pi 5 and then to K3s that is optimized for ARM and is more lightweight than a classic K8s.

Installation and Setup

K3s

Following section assumes that you have Raspberry Pi or other machine that has OS already installed. If you do not, see: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/getting-started.html

K3s installation on Raspbian OS

Before installing K3s, you need to make sure that OS starts with cgroups enabled. In order to do so append following options in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt:

cgroup_memory=1 cgroup_enable=memory

After doing so and rebooting the machine K3s can be installed using one of the two following commands:

Default installation, that will require you to follow the steps in Disabling Traefik Ingress Controller:

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -

Installation with disabled traefik. By using that you will be able to skip the steps in Disabling Traefik Ingress Controller:

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | INSTALL_K3S_EXEC="--disable=traefik" sh -

Disabling Traefik Ingress Controller

When K3s is installed with it's default options, Traefik Ingress Controller is used by default. This project relies on Nginx Ingress Controller, so Traefik has to be disabled.

First startup options of K3s has to be changed in /etc/systemd/system/k3s.service from:

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/k3s \
    server \

to:

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/k3s \
    server \
    --disable=traefik

Then we have to make sure that K3s will not install traefik helm chart that is defined in it's manifest. For that *.skip file has to be added for traefik helm chart manifest:

sudo touch /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/manifests/traefik.yaml.skip

Last step is to restart k3s:

sudo systemctl stop k3s
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start k3s

Installing Nginx Ingress Controller

Installation is easy due to the fact that nginx-ingress is published as a helm chart.

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
helm repo update
helm install nginx-ingress ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx --namespace nginx-ingress --create-namespace --atomic --wait --debug

Other platforms

If you with to use it in environment other than K3s or/and Raspberry Pi or/and Raspbian OS, you need to consider the following:

1. K3s setup differs depending on platform, see: https://docs.k3s.io/installation/requirements
2. Github workflows responsible for building docker images only build the image for linux/arm64 platform

Helm registry

Github Pages in this repo has been turned into a Helm Registry. See: index.yaml

This registry is a valid helm registry and can be added into helm:

$ helm repo add raspi-helm https://irdcat.github.io/raspi/

Services

Installation

Services can be installed using install.sh that is located in a root directory of this project. Script supports two mutually exclusive ways of installing components.

Installing single component

To install single component use following command:

$ ./install.sh --name <component_name> --version <component_version>

Example usage:

$ ./install.sh --name fitness-server --version 0.0.1

Installing components from the manifest

This repository provides a manifest that can be used to install multiple components at once. Example manifest below:

components:
  - name: fitness-server
    version: 0.0.1
  - name: fitness-ui
    version: 0.0.1
  - name: mongo
    version: 0.0.1

To install components using the manifest use following command:

$ ./install.sh --from-manifest <manifest_file>

Example usage:

$ ./install.sh --from-manifest manifest.yaml

Local Development

For the details of working with the components in the local environment, refer to README.md files in the directory refering to the specific component.

Authors

• irdcat - Owner, Development, DevOps
• MatiQQQ - DevOps