Kaweezle Root Filesystem

Run Vanilla Kubernetes on Windows with WSL 2 and Alpine Linux
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Table of Contents

1. Deprecation notice
2. About The Project
   • Built With
3. Getting Started
   • Prerequisites
   • Installation
4. Usage
5. Roadmap
6. Contributing
7. License
8. Contact
9. Acknowledgments

Deprecation notice

This project is being DEPRECATED starting from January 2023. Its main feature, which is building the root filesystem supporting Kaweezle, is being transferred to Iknite. This project is kept for reference.

About The Project

Kaweezle allows running a Kubernetes cluster on Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2).

This project is the sister project of Kaweezle. It contains the root filesystem of the WSL distribution used for running Kubernetes.

The distribution is created from the Alpine mini root FS by adding the appropriate packages from the Edge repository. The container images of the base pods (coredns, api-server, ...) are also downloaded for faster setup times.

The distribution contains a go based executable, iknite that is run by its Windows counterpart (kaweezle) to start or restart the appropriate dependencies and the Kubernetes cluster.

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Built With

This project uses the following components:

• go
• cobra
• logrus
• client-go

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Getting Started

Please refer to the kaweezle readme for installation instructions.

The following sections give instructions on how to use the root filesystem without the kaweezle command.

Prerequisites

To run kaweezle, you'll need to have WSL installed.

The simplest way to install it is to run the following command:

> wsl --install

After reboot, update the kernel and set the default version to version 2:

> sudo wsl --update
> wsl --set-default-version 2

For the other tools, you can use Scoop or Chocolatey.

To use the kubernetes cluster, you will need to have kubectl installed:

> scoop install kubectl

Other tools might be of interest, like k9s, kubectx, kubens or stern. All are available through scoop. You can install all of them at once with the following command:

> scoop install k9s kubectx kubens stern

Download and installation

The root filesystem can be downloaded from the Releases page.

You can create a WSL distribution with the following set of commands:

> cd $env:LocalAppData
> mkdir kwsl
> cd kwsl
> (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("https://github.com/kaweezle/kaweezle-rootfs/releases/download/latest/rootfs.tar.gz", "$PWD\rootfs.tar.gz")
> wsl --import kwsl . rootfs.tar.gz

You will have a WSL distribution called kwsl which file system will be located in the current director:

❯ wsl -l -v
  NAME                    STATE           VERSION
* Alpine                  Stopped         2
  kwsl                    Stopped         2

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Usage

To start the kubernetes cluster, issue the following command:

❯ wsl -d kwsl iknite -v info start -w 120

The distribution is now running:

❯ wsl -l -v
  NAME                    STATE           VERSION
* Alpine                  Stopped         2
  kwsl                    Running         2

Now the kubernetes cluster can be accessed:

❯ $env:KUBECONFIG="\\wsl$\kwsl\root\.kube\config"
❯ kubectl get nodes
NAME              STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
laptop-vkhdd5jr   Ready    <none>   61s   v1.23.1
❯ kubectl get pod --all-namespaces
NAMESPACE            NAME                                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kube-system          coredns-64897985d-bhhzq                   1/1     Running   0          68s
kube-system          coredns-64897985d-mvpbb                   1/1     Running   0          68s
kube-system          etcd-laptop-vkhdd5jr                      1/1     Running   0          84s
kube-system          kube-apiserver-laptop-vkhdd5jr            1/1     Running   0          84s
kube-system          kube-controller-manager-laptop-vkhdd5jr   1/1     Running   0          84s
kube-system          kube-flannel-ds-hkz9p                     1/1     Running   0          68s
kube-system          kube-proxy-xx5xp                          1/1     Running   0          68s
kube-system          kube-scheduler-laptop-vkhdd5jr            1/1     Running   0          78s
kube-system          metrics-server-d9c898cdf-7qbbr            1/1     Running   0          68s
local-path-storage   local-path-provisioner-566b877b9c-qnpzx   1/1     Running   0          68s
metallb-system       controller-7cf77c64fb-h72jx               1/1     Running   0          68s
metallb-system       speaker-2h66l                             1/1     Running   0          68s

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Roadmap

See the open issues for a full list of proposed features (and known issues).

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Contributing

Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion that would make this better, please fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue with the tag "enhancement". Don't forget to give the project a star! Thanks again!

1. Fork the Project
2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
4. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
5. Open a Pull Request

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License

Distributed under the Apache License. See LICENSE for more information.

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Contact

Kaweezle - @kaweezle

Project Link: https://github.com/kaweezle/kaweezle-rootfs

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Acknowledgements

This project started from the amazing work made by yuk7 with wsldl and AlpineWSL.

It also uses the great work made by the Alpine Linux community on the edge repository.

You may be interested by existing alternatives from which we have taken some ideas:

• Rancher Desktop
• Minikube
• Kind

By using kubeadm and Alpine, kaweezle is closer to the clusters you may use on public clouds.

This readme has has been created from the Best-README-Template project.

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