Hauler is a tool designed to ease the burden of working with containers and kubernetes in an airgap. Several components of hauler are used in unison to provide airgap utilities.

Hauler's utility is split into a few commands intended to solve increasingly complex airgapped use cases.

Portable self contained clusters:

Within the hauler package subset of commands, Packages (name to be finalized) can be created, updated, and ran.

A Package is a hauler specific, configurable, self-contained, compressed archive (*.tar.zst) that contains all dependencies needed to 1) create a kubernetes cluster, 2) deploy resources into the cluster.

# Build a minimal portable k8s cluster
hauler package build

# Build a package that deploys resources when deployed
hauler package build -p path/to/chart -p path/to/manifests -i extra/image:latest -i busybox:musl

# Build a package that deploys a cluster, oci registry, and sample app on boot
# Note the aliases introduced
hauler pkg b -p testdata/docker-registry -p testdata/rawmanifests

Hauler packages at their core stand on the shoulders of other technologies (k3s, rke2, and fleet), and as such, are designed to be extremely flexible.

Common use cases are to build turn key, appliance like clusters designed to boot on disconnected or low powered devices. Or portable "utility" clusters that can act as a stepping stone for further downstream deployable infrastructure. Since ever Package is built as an entirely self contained archive, disconnected environments are always a first class citizen.

Image Relocation:

For disconnected workloads that don't require a cluster to be created first, images can be efficiently packaged and relocated with hauler relocate.

Images are stored as a compressed archive of an oci layout, ensuring only the required de-duplicated image layers are packaged and transferred.

Installation

Hauler is and will always be a statically compiled binary, we strongly believe in a zero dependency tool is key to reducing operational complexity in airgap environments.

Before GA, hauler can be downloaded from the releases page for every tagged release

Dev

A Vagrant file is provided as a testing ground. The boot scripts at vagrant-scripts/*.sh will be ran on boot to ensure the dev environment is airgapped.

vagrant up

vagrant ssh

More info can be found in the vagrant docs.

WIP Warnings

API stability (including as a code library and as a network endpoint) is NOT guaranteed before v1 API definitions and a 1.0 release. The following recommendations are made regarding usage patterns of hauler:

alpha (v1alpha1, v1alpha2, ...) API versions: use only through haulerctl
beta (v1beta1, v1beta2, ...) API versions: use as an experimental library and/or API endpoint
stable (v1, v2, ...) API versions: use as stable CLI tool, library, and/or API endpoint

Build

# Current arch build
make build

# Multiarch dev build
goreleaser build --rm-dist --snapshot

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