Installation

Before starting with installation, make sure you meet all the requirements. In particular, you should pay attention to network addon compatibility.

If you’re trying to run MetalLB on a cloud platform, you should also look at the cloud compatibility page and make sure your cloud platform can work with MetalLB (most cannot).

There is two supported ways to install MetalLB: using plain Kubernetes manifests, or using Kustomize.

Installation by manifest

To install MetalLB, apply the manifest:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/metallb/main/manifests/metallb.yaml

This will deploy MetalLB to your cluster, under the metallb-system namespace. The components in the manifest are:

• The metallb-system/controller deployment. This is the cluster-wide controller that handles IP address assignments.
• The metallb-system/speaker daemonset. This is the component that speaks the protocol(s) of your choice to make the services reachable.
• Service accounts for the controller and speaker, along with the RBAC permissions that the components need to function.

The installation manifest does not include a configuration file. MetalLB’s components will still start, but will remain idle until you define and deploy a configmap.

Installation with kustomize

You can install MetalLB with kustomize by pointing on the remote kustomization fle :

# kustomization.yml
namespace: metallb-system

resources:
  - github.com/danderson/metallb//manifests?ref=v0.8.2
  - configmap.yml 

If you want to use a configMapGenerator for config file, you want to tell kustomize not to append a hash to the configMap, as MetalLB is waiting for a configMap named config (see https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize/blob/master/examples/generatorOptions.md):

# kustomization.yml
namespace: metallb-system

resources:
  - github.com/danderson/metallb//manifests?ref=v0.8.2

configMapGenerator:
- name: config
  files:
    - configs/config

generatorOptions:
 disableNameSuffixHash: true