This page is a summary of the steps we took to get browsertrix-cloud running on-prem in a k3s installation at KB.

Mostly this page is just a summary of the contents of the slack thread https://iipc.slack.com/archives/C02DUU7US9M/p1692966466359669?thread_ts=1685144091.950199&cid=C02DUU7US9M

Firstly, IT services installed k3s on a single machine and disabled SELinux.

The first thing to do after this is set the right kubectl configuration:

export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml

The browsertrix-cloud installation is based on the nginx ingress so you must disable traefik:

kubectl -n kube-system delete helmcharts.helm.cattle.io traefik

Then install cert-manager and ingress-nginx

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.12.0/cert-manager.yaml

helm upgrade --install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx --repo https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx --namespace ingress-nginx --create-namespace 

Now clone or download browsertrix cloud. We installed from the ansible-k3s branch, but that should soon be merged with main. Change directory to the browsertrix-cloud directory

cd browsertrix-cloud

and edit the file ./chart/examples/local-config.yaml by adding the following:

ingress:
  host: "btrix-cloud-devel-02.kb.dk"
  scheme: "https"
  tls: true

ingress_class: "nginx"

(replacing btrix-cloud-devel-02.kb.dk with your hostname.)

Then install browsertrix-cloud

helm upgrade --install -f ./chart/values.yaml -f ./chart/examples/local-config.yaml  btrix ./chart/

after this just wait for everything to come up and you should be ready.

Some notes

Users and Registration

Initially you only have the default user as documented in system documentation.

You can invite new users in the web gui, but the confirmation emails don't get sent in the default setup. However you can read the confirmation url in the backend log via

kubectl get pods
kubectl logs browsertrix-cloud-backend-...

or using the kubernetes dashboard if you have that up and running

Limitations with Self-signed Certificates

Since this installation is with self-signed certificates, there can be problems with some functionality. In particular, we could not at first get replay to work in chrome. We found various workarounds:

1. Start chrome from the command line with  "--ignore-certificate-errors" and replay one harvest. Quit chrome and start normally. Now it should work for a while.
2. Use Firefox.
3. Learn how to install a valid TLS certificate.