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K3s and RKE (Rancher)

This document explains how you can install APISIX ingress on k3S and Rancher RKE.

tip

K3s is built for IoT and edge computing applications. Apache APISIX also supports an MQTT Plugin and runs well on ARM processors. APISIX ingress is therefore a good choice to handle North-South traffic in K3s.

Prerequisites#

Install APISIX and ingress controller#

The script below installs APISIX and the ingress controller:

helm repo add apisix https://charts.apiseven.com
helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
helm repo update
#  We use Apisix 3.0 in this example. If you're using Apisix v2.x, please set to v2
ADMIN_API_VERSION=v3
helm install apisix apisix/apisix \
  --set gateway.type=NodePort \
  --set ingress-controller.enabled=true \
  --create-namespace \
  --namespace ingress-apisix \
  --set ingress-controller.config.apisix.serviceNamespace=ingress-apisix \
  --set ingress-controller.config.apisix.adminAPIVersion=$ADMIN_API_VERSION \
  --kubeconfig /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml
kubectl get service --namespace ingress-apisix
IMPORTANT

If you are using K3s, the default kube config file is located in /etc/rancher/k3s/ and you make require root permission.

tip

APISIX Ingress also supports (beta) the new Kubernetes Gateway API.

If the Gateway API CRDs are not installed in your cluster by default, you can install it by running:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/releases/download/v0.5.0/standard-install.yaml

You should also enable APISIX Ingress controller to work with the Gateway API. You can do this by adding the flag --set ingress-controller.config.kubernetes.enableGatewayAPI=true while installing through Helm.

See this tutorial for more info.

This will create the five resources mentioned below:

  • apisix-gateway: dataplane the process the traffic.
  • apisix-admin: control plane that processes all configuration changes.
  • apisix-ingress-controller: ingress controller which exposes APISIX.
  • apisix-etcd and apisix-etcd-headless: stores configuration and handles internal communication.

The gateway service type is set to NodePort. Clients can access APISIX through the Node IPs and the assigned port. To use a service of type LoadBalancer with K3s, use a bare-metal load balancer implementation like Klipper.

You should now be able to use APISIX ingress controller. You can try running this minimal example to see if everything is working perfectly.