alexellis/k3sup

k3sup (pronounced "ketchup") is a small command-line tool written in Go that automates the process of setting up a Kubernetes cluster on remote servers using SSH. Kubernetes is software for running and managing many programs across a group of computers, and k3s is a lightweight version of it made by Rancher that runs well on modest hardware including Raspberry Pi devices. Getting k3s onto a fresh server the manual way involves several steps, k3sup collapses the whole thing to one command that takes under a minute. The basic flow is: you run k3sup install from your own laptop, it connects to the remote server over SSH, installs k3s there, and then downloads the configuration file your laptop needs to control that cluster. From that point you can use the standard Kubernetes command-line tool (kubectl) directly from your machine without ever needing to log into the server again. If you want to add more machines to the cluster as worker nodes, the k3sup join command handles that the same way, SSH-ing into each new machine and registering it with the existing cluster. The tool works with any Linux server you can reach over SSH: bare-metal machines, virtual machines on AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Civo, Linode, and others, as well as Raspberry Pi devices running at home or at the edge. There is also a local install mode if you want to set things up on the same machine you are running k3sup from. The free community edition covers install and join. A paid Pro version adds a plan-and-apply workflow where you describe the full cluster topology in a file, and k3sup installs everything in parallel. Pro also adds a command to pull the configuration from a cluster you did not originally set up with k3sup, and a command to run an arbitrary command across every node at once. k3sup runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. The tool is distributed as a single binary with no external dependencies. The full README is longer than what was shown.