Platform Installation with the Kubefirst CLI

Kubefirst is the name of our command line tool that installs the Kubefirst platform and provides some platform conveniences.

It installs a fully automated platform of open source cloud native tools with a simple init and create command.

Prerequisites

To install kubefirst CLI

AWS Prerequisites

Create an AWS account with billing enabled.
Establish a public hosted zone with dns routing established(docs).
Connect with AdministratorAccess IAM credentials to your AWS account (docs).

Step 1 - Create your kubefirst bot user and a personal access token

The kubefirst cli will automatically create one admin user for you. We refer to this initial user as the kubefirst bot. After the installation, you will temporarily use that kubefirst bot to onboard yourself and the rest your team to the platform. From that point forward, the kubefirst bot should only be used for automated activities, and you can use your own personal account.

This kubefirst bot user needs to be associated with a GitHub user account. Log out of GitHub and create a new GitHub account to represent this new kubefirst bot account. Because this account will be used for automation, it's a good to choose a username that generically represents your company or project name - something like yourcompany-bot is a good idea. You can also have fun with it and give your bot a fun name - the point is that this is not an account for your long term personal use, it's for the kubefirst system to use.

Your new bot account will need to be associated with a GitHub organization.

If you don't already have one that you want to use, while logged into GitHub with your new bot account, establish a new GitHub organization.
If you do already have a GitHub org that you want to add Kubefirst to, you'll need to add your new kubefirst bot to the existing organization now.

GitHub Authorization during install

Kubefirst utilizes the user's GitHub token to generate resources within the user's GitHub account, details.

At the beginning of the installation, Kubefirst will ask you to generate the GitHub token.

Step 2 - `kubefirst init`

Let's init your local setup providing values for the following flags:

Flag	Description	Example
--admin-email	an email address that can be used for certificate renewal alerts	your_name@yourcompany.com
--cloud	we only support aws, gcp coming soon	aws
--hosted-zone-name	name of the platform's hosted zone domain - this will drive the URLs of your tools (gitlab.yourdomain.com, argocd.yourdomain.com, etc)	yourdomain.com
--cluster-name	the name of your cluster	your_cluster_name
--region	name of the aws region in which to place your region specific resources	us-east-1
--profile	name of the aws profile the cli should leverage	default
--s3-suffix	unique identifier for s3 buckets	you-s3-bucket-name
--github-owner	name of your github organization name	your_organization
--aws-nodes-graviton	Graviton nodes (ARM) on AWS EKS compute nodes	true
--aws-nodes-spot	nodes spot on AWS EKS compute nodes	true

kubefirst init \
--admin-email yourname@yourcompany.com \
--cloud aws \
--hosted-zone-name yourdomain.com \
--region us-east-1 \
--profile default \
--cluster-name your-cluster-name \
--github-owner your-github-organization-name

Using a config file

# config.yaml
config:
  admin-email:  yourname@yourcompany.com 
  hosted-zone-name: yourdomain.com
  region: us-east-1 
  profile: default
  cluster-name: your-cluster-name
  github-owner: your-github-organization-name
  cloud: aws

kubefirst init  -c ./config.yaml

The init process produces a directory of utilities, a state file, and some staged platform content that can now be found at ~/.kubefirst

Step 3 - `kubefirst cluster create`

Now it's time to create the platform, to do so, simply run

kubefirst cluster create

What to do next

Continue your journey: