Get started with Upbound Spaces. This guide deploys a self-hosted Upbound cluster with a local kind cluster.

Upbound Spaces allows you to host managed control planes in your preferred environment.

Prerequisites

To get started with Upbound Spaces, you need:

• An Upbound Account string, provided by your Upbound account representative
• A token.json license, provided by your Upbound account representative
• kind installed locally

Provision the hosting environment

Upbound Spaces requires a cloud Kubernetes or kind cluster as a hosting environment. For your first time set up or a development environment, Upbound recommends starting with a kind cluster.

Create a cluster

Provision a new kind cluster.

cat <<EOF | kind create cluster --wait 5m --config=-
kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
nodes:
- role: control-plane
  kubeadmConfigPatches:
  - |
    kind: InitConfiguration
    nodeRegistration:
      kubeletExtraArgs:
        node-labels: "ingress-ready=true"    
  extraPortMappings:
  - containerPort: 443
    hostPort: 443
    protocol: TCP
EOF

Configure the pre-install

Set your Upbound organization account details

Set your Upbound organization account string as an environment variable for use in future steps

export UPBOUND_ACCOUNT=

Set up pre-install configurations

Export the path of the license token JSON file provided by your Upbound account representative.

# Change the path to where you saved the token.
export SPACES_TOKEN_PATH=""

Set the version of Spaces software you want to install.

export SPACES_VERSION=1.2.4

Install a Space

The up CLI gives you a “batteries included” experience. It automatically detects which prerequisites aren’t met and prompts you to install them to move forward. The up CLI introduced Spaces-related commands in v0.19.0. Make sure you use this version or newer.

Install Spaces.

up space init --token-file="${SPACES_TOKEN_PATH}" "v${SPACES_VERSION}" \
  --set "account=${UPBOUND_ACCOUNT}"

You are ready to create your first managed control plane in your Space.

Create your first managed control plane

With your kubeconfig pointed at the Kubernetes cluster where you installed the Upbound Space, create a managed control plane:

up ctp create controlplane1

The first managed control plane you create in a Space takes around 5 minutes to get into a condition=READY state. To report the control plane status, use the following command:

up ctp list

Connect to your managed control plane

The connection details for your managed control plane should now exist in a secret. You can fetch the connection details with the following command:

up ctp connect controlplane1

You can use the kubeconfig to interact with your managed control plane directly:

kubectl get crds