Traefik is a reliable reverse proxy for your cloud workloads. Even the lightweight Kubernetes distribution k3s is installing Traefik as the default reverse proxy and ingress controller to the cluster. However, the Traefik version used with the k3s install is still v1.7.14. It works fine but is missing some useful functions. The function I missed most is the automatic generation of Let's Encrypt certificates for the ingress routes we are using.

The good news: With Version 2 of Traefik we get this function, and much more, back. Let's see how we can setup and use the new Traefik version with k3s.

The goal is to setup a new k3s cluster, install Traefik version 2 and configure some Ingresses which are protected with Let's Encrypt certificates automagically.

Here are the steps we will take:

• Create a extrasmall k3s cluster on Civo
• Point our domain (I use my dummy domain celleri.ch) to the cluster IP
• Install Klipper LB as our LoadBalancer
• Install Traefik v2 onto the cluster
• Deploy a small workload (whoami) to the cluster
• Create an Traefik ingress to the service (with and without TLS termination)
• Use Traefik Middleware to reach the Traefik Dashboard with Basic Authentication