How to configure traefik to be the loadbalancer and ingress for the cluster?

[Mithrandir2k18]

I realize this may not be the ideal spot to ask this question, but as k3d is aimed at spinning up clusters easily, this may even be a feature for the future.

Anyway, I am trying to setup a k3s cluster using k3d that's managed by portainer and load-balanced by treafik, which should also handle ingress. On an ARM64 board with 4GB of RAM and 6 cores, if that matters. This is what I got so far:

Create the cluster without traefikv1

k3d cluster create portainer --api-port 6443 --k3s-arg "--disable=traefik@server:0" --servers 1 --agents 3

Install and expose portainer UI port:

helm install --create-namespace -n portainer portainer portainer/portainer
k3d cluster edit portainer --port-add 30777:30777@server:0

Get and modify traefikv2 helm-manifest to expose ports 80 and 443 for http and https ingress, and install

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/traefik/traefik-helm-chart/master/traefik/values.yaml
sed -i 's/\# hostPort: 8000/hostPort: 80/g' values.yaml
sed -i 's/\# hostPort: 8443/hostPort: 443/g' values.yaml
helm install traefik-ingress traefik/traefik -f values.yaml

Also set ports.traefik.expose to true if you want to expose the dashboard on port 9000.
After that, port-forward 80&443:

k3d cluster edit portainer --port-add 80:CONTAINERPORT@server:0
k3d cluster edit portainer --port-add 443:CONTAINERPORT@server:0

After that deploy any application in portainer (e.g. httpd) and give it a route by configuring traefik as ingress in the cluster setup and then setting it for the application. When I do that, I only ever get 404 errors from any route; which is kind of better than "refused to connect" but not quite success either. So my guess is portainer cannot set the routes of traefik, but at this point I am thoroughly stuck. I realize it must be some kind of kubernetes setting in the values.yaml of traefik, but on the other hand, most of that should be auto discovered as far as I understood the traefik docs, so I wonder if it isn't still a port-forwarding error on my part.

Additionally, this seems as I said above, like a pretty useful feature to have; to setup k3s with traefikv2 for ingress and LB, so I was hoping to maybe get some help here and also humbly request to add this as a feature if it ends up working.

Thank you very much in advance for any help!

[iwilltry42]

Hi @Mithrandir2k18 , thanks for starting this discussion!
I'm a bit confused though...

useful feature to have; to setup k3s with traefikv2 for ingress

But you just disabled that with --k3s-arg "--disable=traefik@server:0".
I guess you're thinking of older versions of K3s. K3s switched to Traefik v2 quite some time ago (I think in 1.20 as per k3s-io/k3s#2910).

[iwilltry42]

I guess those posts were from before early 2021 then where the switch was done 🤔
Our k3d guides on exposing services show you how to use simple Ingress with the default traefik installation: https://k3d.io/v5.3.0/usage/exposing_services/#1-via-ingress-recommended

how do I configure it to do ingress? As I understand it it only does loadbalancing by default.

I think there may be a misunderstanding here. Can you elaborate on what you learned there?

Traefik v2 is the default ingress controller in K3s as of early 2021 (if I remember correctly), so roughly as of K3s v1.20.

My comment regarding exposing the traefik dashboard using an IngressRoute you've read already, right? (though I can't remember if that was for v1 or v2, but I also don't know if anything changed there for the dashboard)
It was used with the default traefik installation: #426 (comment)

[Mithrandir2k18]

Ohhh. This tutorial threw me off because I have used nginx for LB and as reverse proxy before, so confusedme just assumed it'd be used for that as well. I didn't realize this was exactly what I needed. I am going to try that out shortly and see if I can get it to work!

Maybe something simpler like e.g. httpd is a better example for thos section.

[iwilltry42]

Oh ok, got it.
I didn't think this could be confusing, as nginx is a super common webserver and used for many Kubernetes related tutorials 🤔

Anyway, your question is solved then? :)

[Mithrandir2k18]

Yes, if I have any further questions I'll open another Q&A :) Thank you for your help! :)

[Mithrandir2k18]

Just following the link you posted works like a charm, but for some reason portainer won't seem to do it.