Kubernetes K3s Home Lab

This repository contains Kubernetes manifests for my personal K3s homelab, currently running version v1.31.6+k3s1, as of 14 March 2025.

To better understand Kubernetes concepts, I've written all deployment .yaml files myself instead of relying solely on third-party Helm charts.

🚀 Cluster Overview

• Kubernetes Distribution: Rancher K3s
• Load Balancer: MetalLB
• Ingress/Reverse Proxy: NGINX (replacing the default Traefik ingress controller)
• Nodes: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (ARM64, 8GB RAM)
• Operating System: Raspbian Bullseye 64-bit
• Storage and Backups:
  • Persistent storage via dedicated Raspberry Pi NFS server (SSD-based, 500GB)
  • Automatic backups to Google Drive and GitHub

Feel free to explore, reuse, or adapt this repo for your own Kubernetes learning journey!

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installation - k3s

In file /boot/cmdline.txt add the following to the end of the file:

cgroup_enable=cpuset cgroup_enable=memory cgroup_memory=1

Then to install k3s with the default load balancer disabled:

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -s -  --disable=traefik --disable servicelb --write-kubeconfig-mode 644

installation - NFS for persistent storage

Follow this tutorial to configure your pi as a NFS: https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-nfs/

Then to setup the nfs-client-provisioner in k3s:

cd pv_nfs
kubectl apply -f class.yaml
kubectl apply -f rbac.yaml
kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml

installation - NGINX Ingress

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/master/deploy/static/provider/cloud/deploy.yaml

installation - MetalLB Load Balancer

cd metallb
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.14.9/config/manifests/metallb-native.yaml
vi config.yaml  #edit and set the IP address range that has been reserved on your DCHP server
kubectl apply -f config.yaml

installation - enable https ingress using cert-manager & letsencrypt

Below will install cert-manager v1.17.0, which is the latest version as of 14th March 2025.

cd ingress
kubectl create namespace cert-manager
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.17.0/cert-manager.yaml
vi letsencrypt.yaml #update the email address!
kubectl apply -f letsencrypt.yaml

Remeber to open ports 80 and 443 on your firewall / router, and redirect traffic to the master node ingress ip from metallb load balancer. In this example it would be 192.168.1.110. So direct port traffic from both 80 and 443 to 192.168.1.110 respectively.

installation - applications

for each app, deploy pv.yaml to create the persistent volume and then deployment.yaml. Remember to edit pv.yaml and enter your NFS IP address and folder. That's it :)