Documentation

Quick references and deep dives — everything you need to run K3s in production.

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Browse by Category

🚀 Getting Started

First-time setup, basic concepts, and a quick-start example.

🔧 Installation

Install on Linux, macOS, Windows, ARM, or air-gapped.

🌐 Networking

flannel CNI, Traefik ingress, ServiceLB, and network policy.

💾 Storage

Local-path provisioner, persistent volumes, and backup/restore.

🔒 Security

CIS hardening, secrets encryption, network policies, secrets management.

🛠 Operations

Upgrades, HA, monitoring, troubleshooting.

Command Reference

Server / Cluster

# Start the service
sudo systemctl start k3s
sudo systemctl status k3s

# View logs
sudo journalctl -u k3s -f

# Get kubeconfig (already on disk at /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml)
sudo cat /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml

kubectl Shortcuts

# Inspect the cluster
sudo k3s kubectl get nodes
sudo k3s kubectl get pods -A
sudo k3s kubectl get svc -A

# Deploy and expose a workload
sudo k3s kubectl create deployment hello --image=nginx
sudo k3s kubectl expose deployment hello --port=80 --type=NodePort

# Uninstall
sudo /usr/local/bin/k3s-uninstall.sh

Explore Features

See the full feature breakdown and compare with upstream Kubernetes:

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