This section provides information on building k3s from source.

See the release page for pre-built releases.

The clone will be much faster on this repo if you do

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rancher/k3s.git

This repo includes all of Kubernetes history so --depth 1 will avoid most of that.

To build the full release binary run make and that will create ./dist/artifacts/k3s.

Optionally to build the binaries without running linting or building docker images:

./scripts/download && ./scripts/build && ./scripts/package-cli

For development, you just need go 1.12 and a sane GOPATH. To compile the binaries run:

go build -o k3s
go build -o kubectl ./cmd/kubectl
go build -o hyperkube ./vendor/k8s.io/kubernetes/cmd/hyperkube

This will create the main executable, but it does not include the dependencies like containerd, CNI, etc. To run a server and agent with all the dependencies for development run the following helper scripts:

# Server
./scripts/dev-server.sh

# Agent
./scripts/dev-agent.sh

Kubernetes Source

The source code for Kubernetes is in vendor/ and the location from which that is copied is in ./vendor.conf. Go to the referenced repo/tag and you’ll find all the patches applied to upstream Kubernetes.