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🛥️🐳 KSail

Cluster Profiles

KSail’s --profile flag provides pre-built cluster profile templates that bundle opinionated combinations of CNI, CSI, policy engine, GitOps, and other settings into named starting points. This reduces time-to-first-cluster by eliminating manual assembly of configuration after cluster creation.

How --profile Works

Section titled “How --profile Works”

When you pass --profile to ksail cluster init, KSail applies the profile’s defaults to the generated ksail.yaml. Individual flags (--cni, --csi, --gitops-engine, etc.) still override profile defaults when explicitly provided.

Terminal window
# Initialize with the default profile (same as omitting --profile)
ksail cluster init --profile Default

Available Profiles

Section titled “Available Profiles”

Default

Section titled “Default”

The Default profile preserves the current ksail cluster init behaviour — it is a no-op that uses the standard defaults for all fields:

  • Distribution: Vanilla (Kind)
  • CNI: Default (distribution-provided)
  • CSI: Default (distribution-provided)
  • GitOps Engine: None
  • Policy Engine: None
Terminal window
ksail cluster init --profile Default
# Equivalent to: ksail cluster init

Overriding Profile Defaults

Section titled “Overriding Profile Defaults”

Profiles set defaults — any explicitly provided flag takes precedence:

Terminal window
# Start from Default profile but switch to Cilium CNI
ksail cluster init --profile Default --cni Cilium


# Start from Default profile with K3s distribution
ksail cluster init --profile Default --distribution K3s

Compatibility

Section titled “Compatibility”

The --profile flag is compatible with all four distributions (Vanilla, K3s, Talos, VCluster). Unsupported combinations will produce a clear error during initialization.

Section titled “Related”