getting-started.md

Getting started with CAPL

Prerequisites

• A Linode account
• A Personal Access Token (PAT) created via the Linode Cloud Manager. Make sure to create the token with at least the following read/write permissions (or "all"):
  • Linodes
  • NodeBalancers
  • Images
  • Volumes
  • VPCs
  • IPs
  • Object Storage
• clusterctl is installed
• Cluster API management cluster is created

For more information please see the
[Linode Guide](https://www.linode.com/docs/products/tools/api/guides/manage-api-tokens/#create-an-api-token).

Setting up your cluster environment variables

Once you have provisioned your PAT, save it in an environment variable along with other required settings:

export LINODE_REGION=us-ord
export LINODE_TOKEN=<your linode PAT>
export LINODE_CONTROL_PLANE_MACHINE_TYPE=g6-standard-2
export LINODE_MACHINE_TYPE=g6-standard-2

For Regions and Images that do not yet support Akamai's cloud-init datasource CAPL will automatically use a stackscript shim
to provision the node. If you are using a custom image ensure the [cloud_init](https://www.linode.com/docs/api/images/#image-create) flag is set correctly on it

By default, clusters are provisioned within VPC. For Regions which do not have [VPC support](https://www.linode.com/docs/products/networking/vpc/#availability) yet, use the [VPCLess](./flavors/vpcless.md) flavor to have clusters provisioned.

Register linode as an infrastructure provider

1. Add linode as an infrastructure provider in ~/.cluster-api/clusterctl.yaml

   providers:
      - name: linode-linode
        url: https://github.com/linode/cluster-api-provider-linode/releases/latest/infrastructure-components.yaml
        type: InfrastructureProvider

Install CAPL on your management cluster

Install CAPL and enable the helm addon provider which is used by the majority of the CAPL flavors

clusterctl init --infrastructure linode-linode --addon helm

Deploying your first cluster

Please refer to the default flavor section for creating your first Kubernetes cluster on Linode using Cluster API.