Create & Import Your First Cluster

This section will guide you through creating your first cluster and importing it into Rancher Manager. Two alternative methods for cluster provisioning are presented: using a GitOps workflow with Fleet and manually applying the manifests via kubectl.

Prerequisites

Provision a CAPI Workload Cluster

  • GitOps using Fleet

  • Manually using kubectl

Configure your Fleet repository

To simplify the process of cluster provisioning, we will be using a series of pre-configured examples that you can find in the repository https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-turtles-fleet-example. By inspecting the contents of this repository, you will find:

  1. A clusters folder, which is where the manifests are stored.

  2. cluster1.yaml is the CAPI workload cluster definition.

  3. fleet.yaml is used to specify the configuration options for Fleet. In this case it’s declaring that the cluster definition should be added to the capi-clusters namespace.

    If you prefer, you can create your own Fleet repository using the same base structure.

Use Rancher UI to add your Fleet repository

Now the cluster definitions are committed to a git repository they can be used to provision the clusters. To do this they will need to be imported into the Rancher Manager cluster (which is also acting as a Cluster API management cluster) using the Continuous Delivery feature (which uses Fleet).

  1. Go to Rancher Manager

  2. Select Continuous Delivery from the menu: sidebar

  3. Select fleet-local as the namespace from the top right namespace

  4. Select Git Repos from the sidebar

  5. Click Add Repository

  6. Enter clusters as the name

  7. Get the HTTPS clone URL from your git repo git clone url

  8. Add the URL into the Repository URL field

  9. Change the branch name to main

  10. Click Next

  11. Click Create

  12. Click on the clusters name

  13. Watch the resources become ready

  14. Select Cluster Management from the menu

  15. Check your cluster has been imported

Create your cluster definition

To generate the YAML for the cluster, do the following:

  1. Open a terminal and run the following:

    export CLUSTER_NAME=cluster1
export CONTROL_PLANE_MACHINE_COUNT=1
export WORKER_MACHINE_COUNT=1
export KUBERNETES_VERSION=v1.31.4
export NAMESPACE=capi-clusters

# use the SHELL-FORMAT in envsubst to ensure we replace only the
# environment variables we exported above
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-turtles-fleet-example/templates/docker-rke2.yaml | envsubst '$CLUSTER_NAME,$CONTROL_PLANE_MACHINE_COUNT,$WORKER_MACHINE_COUNT,$KUBERNETES_VERSION,$NAMESPACE' > cluster1.yaml

  2. View cluster1.yaml to ensure there are no tokens. You can make any changes you want as well.

  3. Create the cluster using kubectl

    kubectl create namespace capi-clusters
kubectl apply -f cluster1.yaml

  4. Watch the resources become ready

  5. Select Cluster Management from the menu

  6. Check your cluster has been imported

Mark Namespace for auto-import

To automatically import a CAPI cluster into Rancher Manager there are 2 options:

  1. Label a namespace so all clusters contained in it are imported.

  2. Label an individual cluster definition so that it’s imported.

In both cases the label is cluster-api.cattle.io/rancher-auto-import.

This walkthrough will use the first option of importing all clusters in a namespace.

  1. Open a terminal

  2. Label the cluster’s namespace in your Rancher Manager cluster:

kubectl label namespace capi-clusters cluster-api.cattle.io/rancher-auto-import=true

A namespace (or cluster) can be marked for auto-import at any time: before or after the cluster has been created.

To prevent a cluster from getting stuck in deletion when Fleet is removed, keep auto-import enabled in the UI or avoid manually removing labels in the cluster’s namespace, as Turtles will no longer handle the 'import' functionality from that point onward.