You heard of Kubernetes. But you want only a minimal distribution with no fuzz.

So you go out an search online and you find many solutions. You find minikube. You find k3s. You find vcluster. You find kind.

And now you found kindof, yet another way of running Kubernetes, kind of.

kindof is just a script and a Docker Compose file to run etcd, the kube apiserver and the kube controller-manager. There is no kube scheduler, no kube proxy, no DNS, no CNI, no CCM, no nodes.

I needed to quickly and repeatedly setup a Kubernetes control plane without any nodes. Even kind will always provision at least one control-plane node.

In this sense kindof is similar to envtest, but I wanted to learn myself how to bring up the Kubernetes control plane just using a Compose file :)

1. Clone the repository.
2. Have envsubst, certin and Docker installed.
3. Run the bootstrap.sh to generate the certificates and config files.
4. docker-compose up to bring everything up.

Finally, use the generated etc/kubeconfig file to communicate with the kube apiserver.