kubeadm init

Run this command in order to set up the Kubernetes control plane

The “init” command executes the following phases:

Options

Options inherited from parent commands

Init workflow

kubeadm init bootstraps a Kubernetes control-plane node by executing the following steps:

Runs a series of pre-flight checks to validate the system state before making changes. Some checks only trigger warnings, others are considered errors and will exit kubeadm until the problem is corrected or the user specifies --ignore-preflight-errors=<list-of-errors>.
Generates a self-signed CA to set up identities for each component in the cluster. The user can provide their own CA cert and/or key by dropping it in the cert directory configured via --cert-dir (/etc/kubernetes/pki by default). The APIServer certs will have additional SAN entries for any --apiserver-cert-extra-sans arguments, lowercased if necessary.
Writes kubeconfig files in /etc/kubernetes/ for the kubelet, the controller-manager and the scheduler to use to connect to the API server, each with its own identity, as well as an additional kubeconfig file for administration named admin.conf.
Static Pod manifests are written to /etc/kubernetes/manifests; the kubelet watches this directory for Pods to create on startup.

Once control plane Pods are up and running, the kubeadm init sequence can continue.
Apply labels and taints to the control-plane node so that no additional workloads will run there.
Generates the token that additional nodes can use to register themselves with a control-plane in the future. Optionally, the user can provide a token via --token, as described in the kubeadm token docs.
Makes all the necessary configurations for allowing node joining with the and TLS Bootstrap mechanism:
- Write a ConfigMap for making available all the information required for joining, and set up related RBAC access rules.
- Let Bootstrap Tokens access the CSR signing API.
- Configure auto-approval for new CSR requests.
See for additional info.
Installs a DNS server (CoreDNS) and the kube-proxy addon components via the API server. In Kubernetes version 1.11 and later CoreDNS is the default DNS server. Please note that although the DNS server is deployed, it will not be scheduled until CNI is installed.

Warning: kube-dns usage with kubeadm is deprecated as of v1.18 and is removed in v1.21.

Using init phases with kubeadm

Kubeadm allows you to create a control-plane node in phases using the kubeadm init phase command.

To view the ordered list of phases and sub-phases you can call kubeadm init --help. The list will be located at the top of the help screen and each phase will have a description next to it. Note that by calling kubeadm init all of the phases and sub-phases will be executed in this exact order.

Some phases have unique flags, so if you want to have a look at the list of available options add --help, for example:

sudo kubeadm init phase control-plane controller-manager --help

You can also use --help to see the list of sub-phases for a certain parent phase:

kubeadm init also exposes a flag called --skip-phases that can be used to skip certain phases. The flag accepts a list of phase names and the names can be taken from the above ordered list.

An example:

sudo kubeadm init phase control-plane all --config=configfile.yaml
sudo kubeadm init phase etcd local --config=configfile.yaml
# you can now modify the control plane and etcd manifest files
sudo kubeadm init --skip-phases=control-plane,etcd --config=configfile.yaml

What this example would do is write the manifest files for the control plane and etcd in /etc/kubernetes/manifests based on the configuration in configfile.yaml. This allows you to modify the files and then skip these phases using --skip-phases. By calling the last command you will create a control plane node with the custom manifest files.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.22 [beta]

Alternatively, you can use the skipPhases field under InitConfiguration.

Caution: The config file is still considered beta and may change in future versions.

It’s possible to configure kubeadm init with a configuration file instead of command line flags, and some more advanced features may only be available as configuration file options. This file is passed using the --config flag and it must contain a ClusterConfiguration structure and optionally more structures separated by ---\n Mixing --config with others flags may not be allowed in some cases.

The default configuration can be printed out using the kubeadm config print command.

If your configuration is not using the latest version it is recommended that you migrate using the command.

For more information on the fields and usage of the configuration you can navigate to our API reference page.

Using kubeadm init with feature gates

Kubeadm supports a set of feature gates that are unique to kubeadm and can only be applied during cluster creation with kubeadm init. These features can control the behavior of the cluster. Feature gates are removed after a feature graduates to GA.

To pass a feature gate you can either use the --feature-gates flag for kubeadm init, or you can add items into the featureGates field when you pass a configuration file using --config.

Passing directly to kubeadm is not supported. Instead, it is possible to pass them by Customizing components with the kubeadm API.

List of feature gates:

Note: Once a feature gate goes GA its value becomes locked to true by default.

Feature gate descriptions:

PublicKeysECDSA

Can be used to create a cluster that uses ECDSA certificates instead of the default RSA algorithm. Renewal of existing ECDSA certificates is also supported using kubeadm certs renew, but you cannot switch between the RSA and ECDSA algorithms on the fly or during upgrades.

Setting this flag configures the kubeadm deployed control plane component static Pod containers for kube-apiserver, kube-controller-manager, kube-scheduler and etcd to run as non-root users. If the flag is not set, those components run as root. You can change the value of this feature gate before you upgrade to a newer version of Kubernetes.

UnversionedKubeletConfigMap

This flag controls the name of the where kubeadm stores kubelet configuration data. With this flag not specified or set to true, the ConfigMap is named kubelet-config. If you set this flag to false, the name of the ConfigMap includes the major and minor version for Kubernetes (for example: kubelet-config-1.27). Kubeadm ensures that RBAC rules for reading and writing that ConfigMap are appropriate for the value you set. When kubeadm writes this ConfigMap (during kubeadm init or kubeadm upgrade apply), kubeadm respects the value of UnversionedKubeletConfigMap. When reading that ConfigMap (during kubeadm join, kubeadm reset, kubeadm upgrade ...), kubeadm attempts to use unversioned ConfigMap name first; if that does not succeed, kubeadm falls back to using the legacy (versioned) name for that ConfigMap.

Adding kube-proxy parameters

For information about kube-proxy parameters in the kubeadm configuration see:

For information about enabling IPVS mode with kubeadm see:

Passing custom flags to control plane components

For information about passing flags to control plane components see:

Running kubeadm without an Internet connection

For running kubeadm without an Internet connection you have to pre-pull the required control-plane images.

You can list and pull the images using the kubeadm config images sub-command:

kubeadm config images list
kubeadm config images pull

You can pass --config to the above commands with a to control the kubernetesVersion and imageRepository fields.

All default registry.k8s.io images that kubeadm requires support multiple architectures.

By default, kubeadm pulls images from registry.k8s.io. If the requested Kubernetes version is a CI label (such as ci/latest) gcr.io/k8s-staging-ci-images is used.

You can override this behavior by using . Allowed customization are:

To provide kubernetesVersion which affects the version of the images.
To provide an alternative imageRepository to be used instead of registry.k8s.io.
To provide a specific imageRepository and imageTag for etcd or CoreDNS.

Image paths between the default registry.k8s.io and a custom repository specified using may differ for backwards compatibility reasons. For example, one image might have a subpath at registry.k8s.io/subpath/image, but be defaulted to my.customrepository.io/image when using a custom repository.

To ensure you push the images to your custom repository in paths that kubeadm can consume, you must:

Pull images from the defaults paths at registry.k8s.io using kubeadm config images {list|pull}.
Push images to the paths from kubeadm config images list --config=config.yaml, where config.yaml contains the custom imageRepository, and/or imageTag for etcd and CoreDNS.
Pass the same config.yaml to kubeadm init.

Custom sandbox (pause) images

To set a custom image for these you need to configure this in your to use the image. Consult the documentation for your container runtime to find out how to change this setting; for selected container runtimes, you can also find advice within the Container Runtimes topic.

Uploading control-plane certificates to the cluster

By adding the flag --upload-certs to kubeadm init you can temporary upload the control-plane certificates to a Secret in the cluster. Please note that this Secret will expire automatically after 2 hours. The certificates are encrypted using a 32byte key that can be specified using --certificate-key. The same key can be used to download the certificates when additional control-plane nodes are joining, by passing --control-plane and --certificate-key to kubeadm join.

The following phase command can be used to re-upload the certificates after expiration:

Note: A predefined certificateKey can be provided in InitConfiguration when passing the configuration file with --config.

If a predefined certificate key is not passed to kubeadm init and kubeadm init phase upload-certs a new key will be generated automatically.

The following command can be used to generate a new key on demand:

kubeadm certs certificate-key

Certificate management with kubeadm

For detailed information on certificate management with kubeadm see Certificate Management with kubeadm. The document includes information about using external CA, custom certificates and certificate renewal.

Managing the kubeadm drop-in file for the kubelet

The kubeadm package ships with a configuration file for running the kubelet by systemd. Note that the kubeadm CLI never touches this drop-in file. This drop-in file is part of the kubeadm DEB/RPM package.

For further information, see Managing the kubeadm drop-in file for systemd.

Use kubeadm with CRI runtimes

By default kubeadm attempts to detect your container runtime. For more details on this detection, see the kubeadm CRI installation guide.

By default, kubeadm assigns a node name based on a machine’s host address. You can override this setting with the --node-name flag. The flag passes the appropriate --hostname-override value to the kubelet.

Be aware that overriding the hostname can .

Automating kubeadm

Rather than copying the token you obtained from kubeadm init to each node, as in the , you can parallelize the token distribution for easier automation. To implement this automation, you must know the IP address that the control-plane node will have after it is started, or use a DNS name or an address of a load balancer.

Generate a token. This token must have the form <6 character string>.<16 character string>. More formally, it must match the regex: [a-z0-9]{6}\.[a-z0-9]{16}.

kubeadm can generate a token for you:
```
 kubeadm token generate
```
Start both the control-plane node and the worker nodes concurrently with this token. As they come up they should find each other and form the cluster. The same --token argument can be used on both kubeadm init and kubeadm join.
Similar can be done for --certificate-key when joining additional control-plane nodes. The key can be generated using:

Once the cluster is up, you can grab the admin credentials from the control-plane node at /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf and use that to talk to the cluster.

Note that this style of bootstrap has some relaxed security guarantees because it does not allow the root CA hash to be validated with --discovery-token-ca-cert-hash (since it’s not generated when the nodes are provisioned). For details, see the kubeadm join.

kubeadm init phase to understand more about kubeadm init phases
to bootstrap a Kubernetes worker node and join it to the cluster
kubeadm upgrade to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster to a newer version
to revert any changes made to this host by kubeadm init or