Skip to content

Air gapped Installation#

You can install k0s in environments without Internet access. Air gapped installations require an image bundle that contains all the container images that would normally be pulled over the network. K0s uses so-called OCI archives for this: Tarball representations of an OCI Image Layout. They allow for multiple images to be packed into a single file. K0s will watch for image bundles in the <data-dir>/images folder will automatically import them into the container runtime.

There are several ways to obtain an image bundle:

  • Use the pre-built image bundles for different target platforms that are created for each k0s release. They contain all the images for the default k0s image configuration and can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page.
  • Create your own image bundle. In this case, you can easily customize the bundle to include container images that are not used by default in k0s.

Note: When importing image bundles, k0s uses "loose" platform matching. For example, on arm/v8, k0s will also import arm/v7, arm/v6, and arm/v5 images. This means that your bundle can contain multi-arch images, and the import will be done using platform compatibility.

Creating image bundles#

Using k0s built-in tooling#

k0s ships with the k0s airgap sub-command, which is dedicated for tooling for airgapped environments. It allows for listing the required images for a given configuration, as well as bundling them into an OCI Image Layout archive.

  1. Create the list of images required by k0s.

    k0s airgap list-images --all >airgap-images.txt

  2. Review this list and edit it according to your needs.

  3. Create the image bundle.

    k0s airgap bundle-artifacts -v -o image-bundle.tar <airgap-images.txt

From a running worker node#

As containerd pulls all the images during the k0s worker normal bootstrap, you can use it to build the OCI bundle with images.

Use the following commands on a machine with an installed k0s worker:

k0s ctr images export image-bundle.tar $(k0s airgap list-images | xargs)

Using third-party tools#

There are several CLI tools that can help you fetch OCI artifacts and manage OCI Image Layouts, such as skopeo, oras, or crane. The following is an example uses Docker:

Docker#

  1. Create the list of images required by k0s.

    k0s airgap list-images --all >airgap-images.txt

  2. Review this list and edit it according to your needs.

  3. Pull the images.

    xargs -I{} docker pull {} <airgap-images.txt

  4. Create the bundle.

    docker image save -o image-bundle.tar $(xargs <airgap-images.txt)

Placing image bundles on worker nodes#

By hand#

Copy the image-bundle.tar to the target machine into the images directory in the k0s data directory. Copy the bundle only to the worker nodes. Controller nodes don't use it.

# mkdir -p /var/lib/k0s/images
# cp image-bundle.tar /var/lib/k0s/images/image-bundle.tar

Via k0sctl#

As an alternative to the previous step, you can use k0sctl to upload image bundles to worker nodes. k0sctl can also be used to upload the k0s binary file to all nodes. Take a look at this example configuration with one controller and one worker node to upload k0s binary and an image bundle:

apiVersion: k0sctl.k0sproject.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterConfig
metadata:
  name: k0s
spec:
  k0s:
    version: v1.34.0-alpha.2+head
  hosts:
    - role: controller
      ssh:
        address: <controller-ip-address>
        user: ubuntu
        keyPath: /path/to/.ssh/id_rsa

      #  uploadBinary: <boolean>
      #    When true the k0s binaries are cached and uploaded
      #    from the host running k0sctl instead of downloading
      #    directly to the target host.
      uploadBinary: true

      #  k0sBinaryPath: <local filepath>
      #    Upload a custom or manually downloaded k0s binary
      #    from a local path on the host running k0sctl to the
      #    target host.
      # k0sBinaryPath: path/to/k0s_binary/k0s

    - role: worker
      ssh:
        address: <worker-ip-address>
        user: ubuntu
        keyPath: /path/to/.ssh/id_rsa
      uploadBinary: true
      files:
        # This airgap bundle file will be uploaded from the k0sctl
        # host to the specified directory on the target host
        - src: /path/to/airgap-bundle-amd64.tar
          dstDir: /var/lib/k0s/images
          perm: 0755

Disable image pulling (optional)#

Use the following k0s configuration to ensure that all pods and pod templates managed by k0s contain an imagePullPolicy of Never, ensuring that no images are pulled from the Internet at any time.

apiVersion: k0s.k0sproject.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterConfig
metadata:
  name: k0s
spec:
  images:
    default_pull_policy: Never