Installing Linkerd

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Before you can use Linkerd, you’ll need to install the core control plane. This page covers how to accomplish that, as well as common problems that you may encounter.

Linkerd Production Tip

This page contains best-effort instructions by the open source community. Production users with mission-critical applications should familiarize themselves with Linkerd production resources and/or connect with a commercial Linkerd provider.

Note that the control plane is typically installed by using Linkerd’s CLI. See Getting Started for how to install the CLI onto your local environment.

Linkerd also comprises of some first party extensions which add additional features i.e viz, multicluster and jaeger. See Extensions to understand how to install them.

Note also that, once the control plane is installed, you’ll need to “mesh” any services you want Linkerd active for. See Adding Your Service for how to add Linkerd’s data plane to your services.

Requirements

Linkerd 2.x requires a functioning Kubernetes cluster on which to run. This cluster may be hosted on a cloud provider or may be running locally via Minikube or Docker for Desktop.

You can validate that this Kubernetes cluster is configured appropriately for Linkerd by running

linkerd check --pre

GKE

If installing Linkerd on GKE, there are some extra steps required depending on how your cluster has been configured. If you are using any of these features, check out the additional instructions.

Private clusters

Installing

Once you have a cluster ready, generally speaking, installing Linkerd is as easy as running linkerd install to generate a Kubernetes manifest, and applying that to your cluster, for example, via

linkerd install | kubectl apply -f -

See Getting Started for an example.

Note

Most common configuration options are provided as flags for install. See the reference documentation for a complete list of options. To do configuration that is not part of the install command, see how you can create a customized install.

Note

For organizations that distinguish cluster privileges by role, jump to the Multi-stage install section.

Verification

After installation, you can validate that the installation was successful by running:

linkerd check

Uninstalling

See Uninstalling Linkerd.

Multi-stage install

If your organization assigns Kubernetes cluster privileges based on role (typically cluster owner and service owner), Linkerd provides a “multi-stage” installation to accommodate these two roles. The two installation stages are config (for the cluster owner) and control-plane (for the service owner). The cluster owner has privileges necessary to create namespaces, as well as global resources including cluster roles, bindings, and custom resource definitions. The service owner has privileges within a namespace necessary to create deployments, configmaps, services, and secrets.

Stage 1: config

The config stage is intended to be run by the cluster owner, the role with more privileges. It is also the cluster owner’s responsibility to run the initial pre-install check:

linkerd check --pre

Once the pre-install check passes, install the config stage with:

linkerd install config | kubectl apply -f -

In addition to creating the linkerd namespace, this command installs the following resources onto your Kubernetes cluster:

ClusterRole
ClusterRoleBinding
CustomResourceDefinition
MutatingWebhookConfiguration
PodSecurityPolicy
Role
RoleBinding
Secret
ServiceAccount
ValidatingWebhookConfiguration

To validate the config stage succeeded, run:

linkerd check config

Stage 2: control-plane

Following successful installation of the config stage, the service owner may install the control-plane with:

linkerd install control-plane | kubectl apply -f -

This command installs the following resources onto your Kubernetes cluster, all within the linkerd namespace:

ConfigMap
Deployment
Secret
Service

To validate the control-plane stage succeeded, run:

linkerd check