Install Sidero

Sidero is included as a default infrastructure provider in clusterctl, so the installation of both Sidero and the Cluster API (CAPI) components is as simple as using the clusterctl tool.

Note: Because Cluster API upgrades are stateless, it is important to keep all Sidero configuration for reuse during upgrades.

Sidero has a number of configuration options which should be supplied at install time, kept, and reused for upgrades. These can also be specified in the clusterctl configuration file ($HOME/.cluster-api/clusterctl.yaml). You can reference the clusterctl docs for more information on this.

For our purposes, we will use environment variables for our configuration options.

export SIDERO_CONTROLLER_MANAGER_HOST_NETWORK=true
export SIDERO_CONTROLLER_MANAGER_DEPLOYMENT_STRATEGY=Recreate
export SIDERO_CONTROLLER_MANAGER_API_ENDPOINT=192.168.1.150
export SIDERO_CONTROLLER_MANAGER_SIDEROLINK_ENDPOINT=192.168.1.150

clusterctl init -b talos -c talos -i sidero

First, we are telling Sidero to use hostNetwork: true so that it binds its ports directly to the host, rather than being available only from inside the cluster. There are many ways of exposing the services, but this is the simplest path for the single-node management cluster. When you scale the management cluster, you will need to use an alternative method, such as an external load balancer or something like MetalLB.

The 192.168.1.150 IP address is the IP address or DNS hostname as seen from the workload clusters. In our case, this should be the main IP address of your Docker workstation.

Note: If you encounter the following error, this is caused by a rename of our GitHub org from talos-systems to siderolabs.

$ clusterctl init -b talos -c talos -i sidero
Fetching providers
Error: failed to get provider components for the "talos" provider: target namespace can't be defaulted. Please specify a target namespace

This can be worked around by adding the following to ~/.cluster-api/clusterctl.yaml and rerunning the init command:

providers:
  - name: "talos"
    url: "https://github.com/siderolabs/cluster-api-bootstrap-provider-talos/releases/latest/bootstrap-components.yaml"
    type: "BootstrapProvider"
  - name: "talos"
    url: "https://github.com/siderolabs/cluster-api-control-plane-provider-talos/releases/latest/control-plane-components.yaml"
    type: "ControlPlaneProvider"
  - name: "sidero"
    url: "https://github.com/siderolabs/sidero/releases/latest/infrastructure-components.yaml"
    type: "InfrastructureProvider"