Wolfspyrelabs' Dockerized Tinkerbell Environment
Reading over these guides was helpful before getting starte†d:
- Aaron’s “geek gone crazy” blog post on tinkerbell
- based on the above blogpost: Tinkerbell’s baremetal walkthrough ( I guess the tinkerbell team got shamed into making something more thorough? )
More than a documentation, this is an example of installing Tinkerbell in a homelab. The homelab is made of 10 Intel NUCs, with one of them picked to be the Provisioner machine running:
- Nginx
- Tink Server
- Tink CLI
- PostgreSQL
- And everything that runs as part of the docker-compose in sandbox
This page is inspired by Aaron a community member who wrote “Tinkerbell or iPXE boot on OVH”.
In this project we will use Sandbox and everything it depends on. Pick a server, a laptop, or as in this example, an Intel NUC.
This guide also provides a little more of an explanation with very little automation for what happens under the hood in the upstream guides
Quick oneliner to install any needed packages:
To make the configuration, you’ll need to have identified the network space (CIDR) that will be allocated to Tinkerbell for its’ services and managing the hosts.
This guide assumes:
- You are familiar with the underline operating system you decided to use.
- You can access the device where you want to install Tinkerbell Provisioner using SSH or Serial console.
To get Tinkerbell, clone the sandbox repository or download the latest
release. At time of writing it is v0.5.0.
The sandbox repo doesn’t have a build in it, so you’ll need to build it if you wish to use the repo; otherwise, it might be easier to simply Download the latest archive.
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In this case we are using the latest sandbox release that today is v0.4.0. It is important to checkout a specific version and have a look at the changelog when you update. Tinkerbell is under development, but we guarantee as best as we can that tags are good and working end-to-end.
The Tinkerbell sandbox sets up Tinkerbell using the script named 'setup.sh'. The file can be found in the base directory of the sandbox archive.
setup.sh relies on a .env file that can be generated running the command:
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In this case, the network-interface is eth1. The output of this command will be stored inside ./.env. It will look like this:
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The ./.env file has some explanatory comments, but there are a few things to note about the contents. The environment variables in the Tinkerbell Stack version block pin the various parts of the stack to a specific version. You can think of it as a release bundle.
If you are developing or you want to test a different version of a particular tool let’s say Hegel, you can build and push a docker image, replace
TINKERBELL_TINK_HEGEL_IMAGEwith your tag and you are good to go.
Tinkerbell needs a static and predictable IP, that’s why the setup.sh script specifies and sets its own with TINKEBELL_HOST_IP. It is used by Boots to serve the operating system installation environment, for example. And Sandbox provisions (via Docker Compose) an Nginx server that you can use to serve any file you want (OSIE is served via that Nginx).
If your Tinkerbell host IP and LAN CIDR is different than 192.168.1.1/29, you
can set the following environment variables before running the script:
The setup.sh script does a bunch of manipulation to your local environment, so first we
need to install the required dependencies:
=== “Ubuntu”
``` terminal
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https \
ca-certificates \
curl \
gnupg-agent \
ifupdown \
jq \
software-properties-common \
git
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
sudo curl -L \
"https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.26.0/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" \
-o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
```
=== “CentOS”
``` terminal
sudo yum install -y yum-utils jq ifupdown iproute
sudo yum-config-manager \
--add-repo \
https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
yum install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
sudo systemctl start docker
```
Before running the setup.sh script, there are a few handy things to know about it.
The setup.sh script’s main responsibility is to setup the network. It creates a certificate that will be used to setup the registry (this will may change soon). It downloads OSIE and places it inside the Nginx weboot (./deploy/state/webroot/).
You can use the webroot for your own purposes, it is part of
gitignoreand other than OSIE you can serve other operating systems that you want to install in your other servers, or even public ssh keys (whatever you need a link for).
If you’re managing machines on a physical network (as in, not Vagrant VMs), you
can set the environment variable TINKERBELL_SKIP_NETWORKING to a non-empty
value to bypass virtual networking setup.
Now to execute setup.sh.
Load the configuration file:
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and run it:
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At the end of the command you have everything you need to start up the Tinkerbell Provisioner Stack and we use docker-compose for that.
At this point let me point you to the “Local with Vagrant” setup guide because you have everything you need to play with Tinkerbell. Enjoy