2 min read | by Jordi Prats
Some times for convenience we might want to install helm on one of the k3s nodes. If we do so we'll get the following error:
# helm list Error: Kubernetes cluster unreachable: Get "http://localhost:8080/version": dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8080: connect: connection refused This error is telling us that helm is not able to reach the Kubernetes cluster, but since we would expect it to be using 6443 instead of 8080 it is also telling us that it's not using any kubeconfig: That's because the default kubeconfig on a k3s node (or master) it is located under the etc directory (that would be /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml) instead of on the user's home directory.
To fix this using we just need to set the KUBECONFIG variable with the correct path:
export KUBECONFIG=/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml Once this variable is set we'll be able to reach the K3S cluster using helm:
# helm list NAME NAMESPACE REVISION UPDATED STATUS CHART APP VERSION alb-controller kube-system 1 2022-07-01 19:57:04.704395322 +0000 UTC deployed aws-load-balancer-controller-1.4.1 v2.4.1 aws-cloud-controller-manager kube-system 1 2022-07-01 19:57:04.09958298 +0000 UTC deployed aws-cloud-controller-manager-0.0.6 v1.23.0-alpha.0 ebs-csi kube-system 1 2022-07-01 19:57:03.554955011 +0000 UTC deployed aws-ebs-csi-driver-2.6.7 1.6.1 metrics-server kube-system 1 2022-07-01 19:57:04.139117621 +0000 UTC deployed metrics-server-3.8.2 0.6.1 termination-handler kube-system 1 2022-07-01 19:57:03.164567295 +0000 UTC deployed aws-node-termination-handler-0.18.3 1.16.3 Posted on 07/07/2022