Skip to content

Introduction

Getting started

Need help? Join Weave Community Slack.

Listing clusters

To list the details about a cluster or all of the clusters, use:

eksctl get cluster [--name=<name>][--region=<region>]

Basic cluster creation

To create a basic cluster, but with a different name, run:

eksctl create cluster --name=cluster-1 --nodes=4

EKS supports versions 1.15, 1.16, 1.17 and 1.18 (default). With eksctl you can deploy any of the supported versions by passing --version.

eksctl create cluster --version=1.18

Config-based creation

You can also create a cluster passing all configuration information in a file using --config-file:

eksctl create cluster --config-file=<path>

To create a cluster using a configuration file and skip creating nodegroups until later:

eksctl create cluster --config-file=<path> --without-nodegroup

Cluster credentials

To write cluster credentials to a file other than default, run:

eksctl create cluster --name=cluster-2 --nodes=4 --kubeconfig=./kubeconfig.cluster-2.yaml

To prevent storing cluster credentials locally, run:

eksctl create cluster --name=cluster-3 --nodes=4 --write-kubeconfig=false

To let eksctl manage cluster credentials under ~/.kube/eksctl/clusters directory, run:

eksctl create cluster --name=cluster-3 --nodes=4 --auto-kubeconfig

To obtain cluster credentials at any point in time, run:

eksctl utils write-kubeconfig --cluster=<name> [--kubeconfig=<path>][--set-kubeconfig-context=<bool>]

Autoscaling

To use a 3-5 node Auto Scaling Group, run:

eksctl create cluster --name=cluster-5 --nodes-min=3 --nodes-max=5

Note

You will still need to install and configure Auto Scaling. See the "Enable Auto Scaling" section. Also note that depending on your workloads you might need to use a separate nodegroup for each AZ. See Zone-aware Auto Scaling for more info.

SSH access

In order to allow SSH access to nodes, eksctl imports ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub by default, to use a different SSH public key, e.g. my_eks_node_id.pub, run:

eksctl create cluster --ssh-access --ssh-public-key=my_eks_node_id.pub

To use a pre-existing EC2 key pair in us-east-1 region, you can specify key pair name (which must not resolve to a local file path), e.g. to use my_kubernetes_key run:

eksctl create cluster --ssh-access --ssh-public-key=my_kubernetes_key --region=us-east-1

To use AWS Systems Manager (SSM) to SSH onto nodes, you can specify the --enable-ssm flag:

eksctl create cluster --enable-ssm

Note

If you are creating managed nodes with a custom launch template, the --enable-ssm flag is disallowed.

Tagging

To add custom tags for all resources, use --tags.

eksctl create cluster --tags environment=staging --region=us-east-1

Volume size

Note

The default volume size is 80G.

To configure node root volume, use the --node-volume-size (and optionally --node-volume-type), e.g.:

eksctl create cluster --node-volume-size=50 --node-volume-type=io1

Deletion

To delete a cluster, run:

eksctl delete cluster --name=<name> [--region=<region>]

Note

Cluster info will be cleaned up in kubernetes config file. Please run kubectl config get-contexts to select right context.

Contributions

Code contributions are very welcome. If you are interested in helping make eksctl great then see our contributing guide.

Installation

To download the latest release, run:

curl --silent --location "https://github.com/weaveworks/eksctl/releases/latest/download/eksctl_$(uname -s)_amd64.tar.gz" | tar xz -C /tmp
sudo mv /tmp/eksctl /usr/local/bin

Alternatively, macOS users can use Homebrew:

brew tap weaveworks/tap
brew install weaveworks/tap/eksctl

or MacPorts:

port install eksctl

and Windows users can use chocolatey:

chocolatey install eksctl

or scoop:

scoop install eksctl

You will need to have AWS API credentials configured. What works for AWS CLI or any other tools (kops, Terraform etc), should be sufficient. You can use ~/.aws/credentials file or environment variables. For more information read AWS documentation.

You will also need AWS IAM Authenticator for Kubernetes command (either aws-iam-authenticator or aws eks get-token (available in version 1.16.156 or greater of AWS CLI) in your PATH.

Docker

For every release and RC a docker image is pushed to weaveworks/eksctl.

Shell Completion

Bash

To enable bash completion, run the following, or put it in ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile:

. <(eksctl completion bash)

Zsh

For zsh completion, please run:

mkdir -p ~/.zsh/completion/
eksctl completion zsh > ~/.zsh/completion/_eksctl

and put the following in ~/.zshrc:

fpath=($fpath ~/.zsh/completion)

Note if you're not running a distribution like oh-my-zsh you may first have to enable autocompletion:

autoload -U compinit
compinit

To make the above persistent, run the first two lines, and put the above in ~/.zshrc.

Fish

The below commands can be used for fish auto completion:

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish/completions
eksctl completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/eksctl.fish

Powershell

The below command can be referred for setting it up. Please note that the path might be different depending on your system settings.

eksctl completion powershell > C:\Users\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Scripts\eksctl.ps1

Features

The features that are currently implemented are:

  • Create, get, list and delete clusters
  • Create, drain and delete nodegroups
  • Scale a nodegroup
  • Update a cluster
  • Use custom AMIs
  • Configure VPC Networking
  • Configure access to API endpoints
  • Support for GPU nodegroups
  • Spot instances and mixed instances
  • IAM Management and Add-on Policies
  • List cluster Cloudformation stacks
  • Install coredns
  • Write kubeconfig file for a cluster