Table of Contents

Building a K3s Cluster

K3s is a lightweight, fully certified Kubernetes distribution designed for resource-constrained environments and edge deployments. This page walks through standing up a single-node or multi-node K3s cluster.

What this page covers

  • System prerequisites (swap, kernel modules, firewall rules)
  • Installing the K3s server on the first node
  • Joining additional agent nodes
  • Verifying the cluster is healthy
  • Kubeconfig setup for local kubectl access

Single-node installation

A single-node K3s install runs both the control plane and workloads on the same machine. This is suitable for development and low-traffic production deployments.

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

After installation, verify the node is ready:

sudo kubectl get nodes

Multi-node installation

Multi-node clusters require a server node and one or more agent nodes. Detailed instructions will be documented here, including the token-based join process.