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Getting Started with KubeStellar

Set Up A Demo System

This page shows two ways to create particular simple configuration that is suitable for kicking the tires (not production usage). This configuration has kind cluster serving as your KubeFlex hosting cluster and two more serving as WECs. This page covers steps 2—7 from the full installation and usage outline. This page concludes with forwarding you to some example scenarios that illustrate the remaining steps.

The two ways to create this simple configuration are as follows.

  1. A quick automated setup using our demo setup script, which creates a basic working environment for those who want to start experimenting right away.

  2. A Step by step walkthrough that demonstrates the core concepts and components, showing how to manually set up a simple single-host system.

Note for Windows users

For some users on WSL, use of the setup procedure on this page and/or the demo environment creation script may require running as the user root in Linux. There is a known issue about this.

Important: Shell Variables for Example Scenarios

After completing the setup, you will need to define several shell variables to run the example scenarios. The meanings of these variables are defined at the start of the example scenarios document. What is shown later in this document are the specific values that are correct for the setup procedure described in this guide.

The key variables you’ll need are:

  • host_context, its_cp, its_context - for accessing the hosting cluster and ITS
  • wds_cp, wds_context - for accessing the WDS
  • wec1_name, wec2_name, wec1_context, wec2_context - for accessing the workload execution clusters
  • label_query_both, label_query_one - for cluster selection in scenarios

Quick Start Using the Automated Script

If you want to quickly setup a basic environment, you can use our automated installation script.

Install software prerequisites

Be sure to install the software prerequisites before running the script!

The script will check for the pre-reqs and exit if they are not present.

Run the script

The script can install KubeStellar’s demonstration environment on top of kind or k3d

For use with kind

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubestellar/kubestellar/refs/tags/v{{ config.ks_latest_release }}/scripts/create-kubestellar-demo-env.sh) --platform kind

For use with k3d

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubestellar/kubestellar/refs/tags/v{{ config.ks_latest_release }}/scripts/create-kubestellar-demo-env.sh) --platform k3d

If successful, the script will output the variable definitions that you would use when proceeding to the example scenarios. After successfully running the script, proceed to the Exercise KubeStellar section below.

Note: the script does the same things as described in the Step by Step Setup but with a little more concurrency, so it can complete a bit faster. While this is great for getting started quickly with a demo system, you may want to follow the manual setup below to better understand the components and how to create a configuration that meets your needs.

Step by Step Setup

This walks you through the steps to produce the same configuration as does the script above, suitable for study but not production usage. For general setup information, see the full story.

Install software prerequisites

The following command will check for the prerequisites that you will need for the later steps. See the prerequisites doc for more details.

bash <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubestellar/kubestellar/v{{ config.ks_latest_release }}/scripts/check_pre_req.sh) kflex ocm helm kubectl docker kind

If that script complains then take it seriously! For example, the following indicates that you have a version of clusteradm that KubeStellar cannot use.

$ bash <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubestellar/kubestellar/v0.27.1/scripts/check_pre_req.sh) kflex ocm helm kubectl docker kind
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  9278  100  9278    0     0   135k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  137k
✔ KubeFlex (Kubeflex version: v0.8.2.5fd5f9c 2025-03-10T14:58:02Z)
✔ OCM CLI (:v0.11.0-0-g73281f6)
  structured version ':v0.11.0-0-g73281f6' is less than required minimum ':v0.7' or ':v0.10' but less than ':v0.11'

This setup recipe uses kind  to create three Kubernetes clusters on your machine. Note that kind does not support three or more concurrent clusters unless you raise some limits as described in this kind “known issue”: Pod errors due to “too many open files” .

Cleanup from previous runs

If you have run this recipe or any related recipe previously then you will first want to remove any related debris. The following commands tear down the state established by this recipe.

kind delete cluster --name kubeflex
kind delete cluster --name cluster1
kind delete cluster --name cluster2
kubectl config delete-context cluster1
kubectl config delete-context cluster2

After that cleanup, you may want to set -e so that failures do not go unnoticed (the various cleanup commands may legitimately “fail” if there is nothing to clean up).

Set the Version appropriately as an environment variable

kubestellar_version={{ config.ks_latest_release }}

Create a kind cluster to host KubeFlex

For convenience, a new local Kind cluster that satisfies the requirements for playing the role of KubeFlex hosting cluster can be created with the following command:

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubestellar/kubestellar/v{{ config.ks_latest_release }}/scripts/create-kind-cluster-with-SSL-passthrough.sh) --name kubeflex --port 9443

Use Core Helm chart to initialize KubeFlex and create ITS and WDS

helm upgrade --install ks-core oci://ghcr.io/kubestellar/kubestellar/core-chart \
    --version "$kubestellar_version" \
    --set-json ITSes='[{"name":"its1"}]' \
    --set-json WDSes='[{"name":"wds1"},{"name":"wds2","type":"host"}]' \
    --set verbosity.default=5  # so we can debug your problem reports

That command will print some notes about how to get kubeconfig “contexts” named “its1”, “wds1”, and “wds2” defined. Do that, because those contexts are used in the steps that follow.

kubectl config use-context kind-kubeflex # this is here only to remind you, it will already be the current context if you are following this recipe exactly
kflex ctx --set-current-for-hosting # make sure the KubeFlex CLI's hidden state is right for what the Helm chart just did
kflex ctx --overwrite-existing-context wds1
kflex ctx --overwrite-existing-context wds2
kflex ctx --overwrite-existing-context its1

Wait for ITS to be fully initialized

The Helm chart above has a Job that initializes the ITS as an OCM “hub” cluster. Helm does not have a way to wait for that initialization to finish. So you have to do the wait yourself. The following commands will do that.

kubectl --context kind-kubeflex wait controlplane.tenancy.kflex.kubestellar.org/its1 --for 'jsonpath={.status.postCreateHooks.its-hub-init}=true' --timeout 90s
kubectl --context kind-kubeflex wait -n its1-system job.batch/its-hub-init --for condition=Complete --timeout 150s
kubectl --context kind-kubeflex wait controlplane.tenancy.kflex.kubestellar.org/its1 --for 'jsonpath={.status.postCreateHooks.install-status-addon}=true' --timeout 90s
kubectl --context kind-kubeflex wait -n its1-system job.batch/install-status-addon --for condition=Complete --timeout 150s

To learn more about the Core Helm Chart, refer to the Core Helm Chart documentation

Create and register two workload execution clusters

The following steps show how to create two new kind clusters and register them with the hub as described in the official open cluster management docs .

Note that kind does not support three or more concurrent clusters unless you raise some limits as described in this kind “known issue”: Pod errors due to “too many open files” .

  1. Execute the following commands to create two kind clusters, named cluster1 and cluster2, and register them with the OCM hub. These clusters will serve as workload clusters. If you have previously executed these commands, you might already have contexts named cluster1 and cluster2. If so, you can remove these contexts using the commands kubectl config delete-context cluster1 and kubectl config delete-context cluster2.

    : set flags to "" if you have installed KubeStellar on an OpenShift cluster
flags="--force-internal-endpoint-lookup"
clusters=(cluster1 cluster2);
for cluster in "${clusters[@]}"; do
   kind create cluster --name ${cluster}
   kubectl config rename-context kind-${cluster} ${cluster}
   clusteradm --context its1 get token | grep '^clusteradm join' | sed "s/<cluster_name>/${cluster}/" | awk '{print $0 " --context '${cluster}' --singleton '${flags}'"}' | sh
done

    The clusteradm command grabs a token from the hub (its1 context), and constructs the command to apply the new cluster to be registered as a managed cluster on the OCM hub.

  2. Repeatedly issue the command:

    kubectl --context its1 get csr

    until you see that the certificate signing requests (CSR) for both cluster1 and cluster2 exist. Sometimes it can take a little while for the CSRs to appear after running the join commands, so if you do not see them immediately, wait a few seconds and try again. Note that the CSRs condition is supposed to be Pending until you approve them in step 4.

    For convenience, you can use a shell loop to automatically check every few seconds:

    # This will check every 10 seconds until both CSRs are present
while true; do
  kubectl --context its1 get csr
  # Replace 2 with the number of clusters you are registering if different
  if [ $(kubectl --context its1 get csr | grep -c Pending) -ge 2 ]; then
    echo "Both CSRs found."
    break
  fi
  echo "Waiting for CSRs to appear..."
  sleep 10
done

  3. the CSRs are created, approve the CSRs complete the cluster registration with the command:

    clusteradm --context its1 accept --clusters cluster1
clusteradm --context its1 accept --clusters cluster2

  4. Check the new clusters are in the OCM inventory and label them:

    kubectl --context its1 get managedclusters
kubectl --context its1 label managedcluster cluster1 location-group=edge name=cluster1
kubectl --context its1 label managedcluster cluster2 location-group=edge name=cluster2

Variables for running the example scenarios

Important: Before moving on to try exercising KubeStellar, you will need the following shell variable settings to inform the scenario commands about the configuration.

host_context=kind-kubeflex
its_cp=its1
its_context=its1
wds_cp=wds1
wds_context=wds1
wec1_name=cluster1
wec2_name=cluster2
wec1_context=$wec1_name
wec2_context=$wec2_name
label_query_both=location-group=edge
label_query_one=name=cluster1

Note: These variable values are specific to the setup described in this guide. If you followed a different setup procedure, you will need to adjust these values accordingly.

Exercise KubeStellar

Now that your system is running, you can try some example scenarios

  1. Define the needed shell variables using the settings from the Variables for running the example scenarios section above. If you used the automated script, use the settings it output. The meanings of these variables are defined at the start of the example scenarios document.

  2. Proceed to Scenario 1 (multi-cluster workload deployment with kubectl) in the example scenarios and/or other examples on the same page, after defining the shell variables that characterize the configuration created above.

Next Steps

The configuration created here was a basic suitable for learning. The full Installation and Usage outline shows that KubeStellar has a lot of flexibility.

  • Create Kubernetes clusters any way you want
  • Multiple Inventory and Transport Spaces (ITS)
  • Multiple Workload Definition Spaces (WDS)
  • Dynamic addition and removal of ITSes
  • Dynamic addition and removal of WDSes
  • Use the KubeFlex hosting cluster or a KubeFlex Control Plane as ITS
  • Use the KubeFlex hosting cluster or a KubeFlex Control Plane as WDS
  • Dynamic addition and removal of Workload Execution Clusters (WECs)

For general setup information, see the full story.

Troubleshooting

In the event something goes wrong, check out the troubleshooting page to see if someone else has experienced the same thing

Architecture