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How to Use Productive K3S

The simplest way to use productive-k3s is to run the release installer on one of the supported platforms, in a host or a VM with those operating systems.

Required host/VM commands for this install path:

  • bash
  • sudo
  • curl
  • tar
  • sha256sum
  • mktemp

Before install

If you want to see how the installer would run before changing anything on the machine, you can first do an optional dry run:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/jemacchi/productive-k3s/releases/download/vX.Y.Z/install-productive-k3s.sh | bash -s -- --dry-run

Even in dry-run, the script may still show prompts based on what it detects on the host, for example whether an existing k3s installation should be reused. Those prompts are used to build the execution plan, but dry-run still does not apply changes.

What will happen on the host

The bootstrap is expected to run on the target machine itself. It can:

  • install missing OS packages with apt-get
  • install or reuse k3s
  • install or reuse helm
  • configure the local single-node stack components

By default, the practical target is a single supported VM or Linux host.

This is not intended for an arbitrary Linux distribution. The target must match the supported platforms page, whether it is a real host or a VM.

Basic install

Replace vX.Y.Z with the release you want to install:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/jemacchi/productive-k3s/releases/download/vX.Y.Z/install-productive-k3s.sh | bash

That installer downloads the matching release bundle and runs the bootstrap on the host.

After install

Once the bootstrap finishes, use the validation and reference docs to inspect the result: