Getting Started

Before you begin

There are some prerequisites before you start using talhelper.

• You need talhelper installed on your workstation (of course), head over to the Installation page for more detail.
• You also need sops installed and configured with your preferred encryption tool (age, pgp, etc). If you want to use doppler instead, there's an alternative way to do this thanks to @truxnell which you can read here
• You also need talosctl installed on your workstation to apply the generated machine config files.

Once you have all of the above conditions met, you can now start with the Scenario that suits your current situation.

Scenarios

Depending on which situation you are currently in before integrating talhelper to your stack, here are some simplified steps to get you started:

You already have a Talos cluster running

If you already have your Talos Kubernetes cluster up and running but you haven't GitOps it yet. Here are the steps you need to do:

1. Get your node's machineconfig using talosctl: talosctl -n <node-ip> read /system/state/config.yaml > /tmp/machineconfig.yaml.
2. Run talhelper gensecret -f /tmp/machineconfig.yaml > talsecret.sops.yaml. This command will create a talsecret.sops.yaml file with all your current cluster secrets.
3. Encrypt the secret with sops: sops -e -i talsecret.sops.yaml (you will need sops configured properly).
4. Create a talconfig.yaml based on your current cluster, here's the example template. For all the available options, look at the Configuration Reference
5. Run talhelper genconfig and the output files will be in ./clusterconfig by default.
6. You can now do talosctl apply-config commands to the generated files.
7. Commit your talconfig.yaml and talsecret.yaml in your git repository.

You are starting from scratch

If you are creating a Talos Kubernetes cluster from scratch and you want to use talhelper, that's awesome! Here are the steps you need to do:

1. Create a talconfig.yaml according to your needs, here's the example template. For all the available options, look at the Configuration Reference
2. Run talhelper gensecret > talsecret.sops.yaml. This command will create a talsecret.sops.yaml file with your future cluster secrets.
3. Encrypt the secret with sops: sops -e -i talsecret.sops.yaml (you will need sops configured properly).
4. Run talhelper genconfig and the output files will be in ./clusterconfig by default.
5. You can now do talosctl apply-config commands to the generated files.
6. Commit your talconfig.yaml and talsecret.yaml in your git repository.