Here are the steps we will take:

Create a extrasmall k3s cluster on Civo

Point our domain (I use my dummy domain celleri.ch ) to the cluster IP

) to the cluster IP Install Klipper LB as our LoadBalancer

as our LoadBalancer Install Traefik v2 onto the cluster

onto the cluster Deploy a small workload (whoami) to the cluster

Create an Traefik ingress to the service (with and without TLS termination)

ingress to the service (with and without TLS termination) Use Traefik Middleware to reach the Traefik Dashboard with Basic Authentication

Create Civo cluster

Head over to Civo and create an extra small cluster with only 2 nodes for this purposes. If you dont have an account yet, sign up and apply for the KUBE100 beta program to use their Kubernetes offering. It's a very friendly crowd and helpful and responsive (even on Sundays) on their Slack channel.

Make sure that we do not install Traefik with the base setup! Just unselect Traefik unter the Architecture tab

After 2 minutes or less we will get the following cluster:

Next we note down the IP-address of our master node and download the kubeconfig file. In our case it's named civo-k3s-with-traefik2-kubeconfig since we named the cluster k3s-with-traefik2. To access the cluster from our command line with kubectl we need to point the environment variable towards the config file and change the context to our new cluster.

# set env variable with new cluster config export KUBECONFIG=./civo-k3s-with-traefik2-kubeconfig kubectl config use-context k3s-with-traefik2 #check the available nodes kubectl get nodes NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION kube-master-de56 Ready master 9m15s v1.16.3-k3s.2 kube-node-40e7 Ready 7m21s v1.16.3-k3s.2

As we can see, our new cluster with a master and a worker node is ready! Let's move on.

Point the domain celleri.ch to the new cluster ip address

Since a while back I am using the DNS Services of Cloudflare to play around with all this new Kubernetes stuff. It's very reliable, has a nice user interface and the basic service I use comes free of charge. A big thank you Cloudflare for this!

In Cloudflare we apply the following settings:

For this example we dont want to create a CNAME entry for every subdomain we might use, therefore we create a wildcard (*) entry as a CNAME here. Traefik will make sure to route the traffic to tzhe right place later.

Install Klipper LB as our LoadBalancer

The Kubernetes distribution from k3s is installed with Traefik V1.7.x as a default. The default installation is also deploying a internal LoadBalancer from Rancher called Klipper LB. Since we opted out of the Traefik installation while setting up the cluster, we have to install Klipper LB manually ourselfes now.

Klipper will hook itself onto the Host Ports of our cluster nodes and will use the Ports 80, 443 and 8080.

You will find all the files I mention here in my GitHub Repo - k3s-with-traefik.

# install KlipperLB kubectl apply -f 00-klipper-lb/klipper.yaml # see if klipper hooked up to the host ports and is working kc get pods --all-namespaces | grep svclb kube-system svclb-traefik-gc8lg 3/3 Running 0 96s kube-system svclb-traefik-pqbzb 3/3 Running 0 96s

The pods seem to work with 3 containers (one for each host port) running inside them. Let's move on and install Traefik Version 2!

Install Traefik v2 into the cluster

Traefik Version 2 comes with a lot of CRD's (Custom Resource Definitions). This seems to be the new and approved way to extend Kubernetes objects. I have not wrapped my head around them to the full extent, but let's use the anyway. They seem to work. You find the right yaml files in the Traefik Documentation or you can use my 01-traefik-crd/traefik-crd.yaml file provided in the GitHub Repo

# apply traefik crd's kubectl apply -f 01-traefik-crd/traefik-crd.yaml

This command should create 5 customresourcedefinition 's.

To let Traefik do what it needs to do, we also need a clusterrole and a clusterrolebinding . We can apply this with:

# apply clusterrole and clusterrolebinding kubectl apply -f 01-traefik-crd/traefik-clusterrole.yaml

Notice that we do the clusterrolebinding for the ServiceAccount in the namespace kube-system since we will install traffic into this namespace later!

kind: ClusterRoleBinding apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1 metadata: name: traefik-ingress-controller roleRef: apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io kind: ClusterRole name: traefik-ingress-controller subjects: - kind: ServiceAccount name: traefik-ingress-controller namespace: kube-system

Finally we are able to deploy the Traefik Service , ServiceAccount and Deployment to the cluster:

kubectl apply -f 02-traefik-service/traefik.yaml

This should leave us with a Service of type LoadBalancer with the external address of the master node of our cluster:

# get traefik service kubectl get svc -n kube-system | grep traefik traefik LoadBalancer 192.168.211.177 185.136.232.122 80:32286/TCP,443:30108/TCP,8080:30582/TCP 3m43s

Deploy a small workload (whoami) to the cluster

Now it's time to create a service in our cluster and try to call it from the big world outside trough our Traefik proxy. For this example we are using the whoami service which is used in all the examples of the Traefik documentation as well. Let's deploy it:

# deploy `whoami` in namespace `default` kubectl apply -f 03-workload/whoami-service.yaml #check the deployment kubectl get pods | grep whoami whoami-bd6b677dc-lfxbx 1/1 Running 0 5m37s whoami-bd6b677dc-92jzj 1/1 Running 0 5m37s

Seems to work. Now on to the exiting part, the Traefik Ingress...

Create two Traefik ingresses to the service (with and without TLS termination)

We want to access the whoami service from the outside, so we can finally define the IngressRoute objects. Yes, those objects were defined in the CRD's we installed earlier. Now they comein handy. We deploy the IngressRoutes as follows:

kubectl apply -f 03-workload/whoami-ingress-route.yaml

As you can see in the definition we have one route (with PathPrefix '/tls') specified with a tls.certResolver=default . This certResolver is defined in our 02-traefik-service/traefik.yaml file. But we look into this in a moment.

apiVersion: traefik.containo.us/v1alpha1 kind: IngressRoute metadata: name: ingressroute-notls namespace: default spec: entryPoints: - web routes: - match: Host(`celleri.ch`) && PathPrefix(`/notls`) kind: Rule services: - name: whoami port: 80 --- apiVersion: traefik.containo.us/v1alpha1 kind: IngressRoute metadata: name: ingressroute-tls namespace: default spec: entryPoints: - websecure routes: - match: Host(`celleri.ch`) && PathPrefix(`/tls`) kind: Rule services: - name: whoami port: 80 tls: certResolver: default

Now start the browser and see what will happen on the address http://celleri.ch/notls . Yes the pod is answering:

What about https://celleri.ch/tls . It works as well, but tells us first the connection is not safe. If we look at the certificate we see why:

As a precaution to not get locked out of Let's Encrypt because we hit the production server with to many requests in case our setup does not work, we used the staging server in our Traefik Service. Let's change that and use the production server to get a real certificate.

Change the certResolver to use the Let'Encrypt production server

In our definition of the Traefik Deployment we have the following arguments:

... cropped for readability ... spec: serviceAccountName: traefik-ingress-controller containers: - name: traefik image: traefik:v2.0 args: - --api.insecure - --accesslog - --entrypoints.web.Address=:80 - --entrypoints.websecure.Address=:443 - --providers.kubernetescrd - --certificatesresolvers.default.acme.tlschallenge - [email protected] - --certificatesresolvers.default.acme.storage=acme.json # Please note that this is the staging Let's Encrypt server. - --certificatesresolvers.default.acme.caserver=https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory ... cropped for readability ...

We tell Traefik to use the certificatesresolvers with the name default with the tlschallange method. Further we provide our email and the storage for the certificates. And we also mention that we want to use the staging caserver .

Important: In our deployment we have no storage provider or volume. This means, that our certificates will vanish as soon as our deployment is reloaded. The certificates live only in the memory of our pods. In production environments we have to adress this and provide a volume!

Ok, let's comment out the caserver line and redeploy our Traefik deployment to see if we get a real certificate:

... cropped for readability ... spec: serviceAccountName: traefik-ingress-controller containers: - name: traefik image: traefik:v2.0 args: - --api.insecure - --accesslog - --entrypoints.web.Address=:80 - --entrypoints.websecure.Address=:443 - --providers.kubernetescrd - --certificatesresolvers.default.acme.tlschallenge - [email protected] - --certificatesresolvers.default.acme.storage=acme.json # Please note that this is the staging Let's Encrypt server. # - --certificatesresolvers.default.acme.caserver=https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory ... cropped for readability ...

# deploy the changed file kubectl apply -f 02-traefik-service/traefik.yaml

And after a while we get a valid certificate - Great!

After this, we could lean back, open a beer and be happy with the result. But we want to go a step further. Traefik Version 2 has also a nice Dashboard to look at all the Ingress stuff going on. But we dont want everybody in public to be able to access our Dashboard just like that. Some basic authentication would be nice...

Use Traefik Middleware to reach the Traefik Dashboard with Basic Authentication

Traefik gets us covered here as well! They introduced a new term called Middleware which helps us with a lot of tasks when it comes to handle incoming requests. We will use the basicAuth Middleware to protect and expose our Traefik Dashboard to the outside world.

First we need to create a Secret with our username and password hash for the basicAuth Middleware to pick up later:

# create user:password file 'user' htpasswd -c ./user cellerich # enter password twice... # create secret from password file kubectl create secret generic traefik-admin --from-file user -n kube-system

Make sure to create the Secret in the namespace kube-system since Traefik Service and it's Dashboard lives in this namespace as well!

Then we deploy the Middleware and the IngressRoute to our cluster:

kubectl apply -f 04-traefik-dashboard/traefik-admin-withauth.yaml

Now we head over to https://traefik.celleri.ch and are greeted with a login prompt:

With the right credentials we will get the nice Traefik Version 2 Dashboard:

And we can get a lot of information about our Ingress Routes:

Final thoughts

That's it. On my research for this journey I did not find that many examples on how to setup Traefik Version 2 within k3s. Especially the part with Klipper LB was never mentioned. That's why I like to share my experience with the great community out there. Hope it helps somebody, at least it will help my future self to find the info again later.

The files for this project are hosted on my GitHub Account