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Running K3s on Raspberry Pi

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Introduction
Preparing Your Raspberry Pi Cluster
Installing K3s
Using Your K3s Cluster
Real-World Deployments
Advanced Topics
Final Project
Summary

CI/CD on K3s

Learn how to set up continuous integration and deployment workflows for your K3s cluster using GitHub Actions and GitOps tools like ArgoCD or Flux.

By Kevin McAleer,    3 Minutes

Page last updated May 24, 2025

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Running apps manually is fine for testing, but to manage real applications, you need CI/CD — Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to automate deployment to your K3s cluster using tools like GitHub Actions, kubectl, and GitOps platforms such as ArgoCD or Flux.

🔄 CI/CD Overview

A typical CI/CD pipeline for K3s:

  1. Push to GitHub repo
  2. GitHub Actions builds container image
  3. Push image to Docker Hub or GHCR
  4. Deploy to K3s using:
    • kubectl apply
    • or GitOps controller (ArgoCD/Flux)

🛠 Option 1: GitHub Actions + kubectl

🧱 Step 1: Set Up Kubeconfig Access

To allow GitHub Actions to deploy, save your ~/.kube/config from your master node, base64-encode it:

cat ~/.kube/config | base64 -w 0

Add it as a GitHub Secret (e.g., KUBECONFIG_B64).

📄 Step 2: Sample GitHub Actions Workflow

name: Deploy to K3s

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Set up kubectl
        run: |
          echo "$" | base64 -d > kubeconfig
          export KUBECONFIG=$PWD/kubeconfig
          kubectl version --client

      - name: Apply manifests
        run: |
          kubectl apply -f k8s/

Your repo should have a k8s/ folder with Kubernetes manifests.

🚀 Option 2: GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux

GitOps tools automatically sync your cluster with a Git repository.

📦 Benefits:

  • Full version control of deployments
  • Rollbacks via Git history
  • Auto-syncing of environments

🧰 Getting Started with ArgoCD:

kubectl create namespace argocd
kubectl apply -n argocd \
  -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml

Access ArgoCD UI:

kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 8080:443

Default login:

  • user: admin
  • password: (from secret)
kubectl get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -n argocd -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d

Connect your Git repo and ArgoCD will deploy automatically on changes.

📋 Summary

You now know how to:

  • Use GitHub Actions to deploy apps to K3s
  • Securely handle kubeconfig in CI pipelines
  • Use ArgoCD or Flux for GitOps-style automation
  • Build production-ready workflows from your Raspberry Pi cluster

Next up: Advanced Networking & CNI

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