Upbound Universal Crossplane (UXP) is the Upbound official enterprise-grade distribution of Crossplane for self-hosted control planes.

Install UXP into an existing Kubernetes cluster to access Upbound features like official providers or community Crossplane features.

Install Upbound Universal Crossplane

Installing UXP requires the Up command-line.

Use the up uxp install command to install UXP into the current Kubernetes cluster based on ~/.kube/config.

up uxp install

Up installs the latest stable UXP release into the upbound-system namespace.

Install a specific Upbound Universal Crossplane version

Install a specific version of UXP with up uxp install <version>.

The list of available versions is in the charts.upbound.io/stable listing.

Install Upbound Universal Crossplane in a custom namespace

Install UXP into a specific namespace using the -n <NAMESPACE> option.

For example, to install UXP into the upbound-test namespace use the command

up uxp install -n upbound-test

Install unreleased Upbound Universal Crossplane versions

Install unreleased versions of UXP for testing or troubleshooting. Don’t install unreleased versions for production use without explicit guidance from Upbound.

Find available unreleased releases in the charts.upbound.io/main listing.

Install the latest unreleased version with the --unstable flag.

up uxp install --unstable

Install a specific release with up uxp install --unstable <version>

Customize install options

Change default install settings via the command-line with --set <key>=<value> or a settings file with -f <file>.

Provide file-based configurations as a Helm values file.

For example to configure two Crossplane pod replicas with --set:

up uxp install --set replicas=2

or with a file:

cat settings.yaml
replicas: 2

up uxp install -f settings.yaml

View the upbound-system pods to see two Crossplane pods deployed.

kubectl get pods -n upbound-system
NAME                                         READY   STATUS    RESTARTS        AGE
crossplane-75556d97b6-gpzq7                  1/1     Running   0               4m23s
crossplane-75556d97b6-xm8bj                  1/1     Running   0               4m23s
crossplane-rbac-manager-8f5c76d46-kvmpm      1/1     Running   0               4m23s
provider-aws-a1113cd136a1-59b8587f6f-q8bpt   1/1     Running   0               4h55m

Configure Upbound Universal Crossplane installed from the Amazon EKS management console

If you have installed uxp directly from the Amazon EKS management console, you need to grant crossplane and any provider cluster level roles.

Upbound tailored the uxp installation to fit AWS requirements and Upbound removes the crossplane-rbac-manager from the installation.

To install and use any provider, you must to configure uxp by granting cluster scope permissions to the crossplane pod and provider pods.

These steps are necessary only for the installations without crossplane-rbac-manager.

First grant crossplane a cluster-admin role.

kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-crossplane-admin \
        --clusterrole=cluster-admin \
        --serviceaccount upbound-system:crossplane

Next, for each installed provider, add cluster-admin role binding. An example for provider AWS:

# Retrieve provider sa name
provider_aws=$(kubectl get sa -n upbound-system \
              | grep provider-aws \
              | awk '{print $1}')
# Grant cluster-admin role
kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-provider-aws-admin \
        --clusterrole=cluster-admin \
        --serviceaccount upbound-system:"$provider_aws"

Restart crossplane and provider aws pods for the changes to take effect

AWS_POD=$(kubectl get pods -n upbound-system | grep provider-aws | awk '{print $1}') && \
          kubectl delete pod -n upbound-system $AWS_POD

CROSSPLANE_POD=$(kubectl get pods -n upbound-system | grep crossplane | awk '{print $1}') && \
          kubectl delete pod -n upbound-system $CROSSPLANE_POD