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Deploy with NeonDESKTOP

An easy way to get started with NeonKUBE and Kubernetes is to install NeonDESKTOP and have it install a local desktop cluster.

note

NeonDESKTOP cluster is not intended for hosting production workloads.

Requirements​

  • Windows Home or Professional
  • CPU: 4+ cores
  • Disk: 500GB with 84GB free
  • Memory: 32GB

Installation​

Download and run the NeonDESKTOP installer from one of our releases at:

https://github.com/nforgeio/neonKUBE/releases

This configures Hyper-V and also installs NeonDESKTOP. You may be prompted to reboot your machine (e.g. when Hyper-V was not already installed and enabled).

NeonDESKTOP will prompt to deploy a local desktop cluster the first time it runs. You can choose to do this right away or later via the NeonDESKTOP taskbar menu.

Operations​

After a cluster is deployed, you can use the taskbar menu to perform operations like: starting, stopping, pausing, removing, displaying dashboards, etc. You'll also be able to use the neon command line tool to manipulate the cluster.

note

The dashboards are secured by free TLS certificates generated by our integration with Lets Encrypt and ZeroSSL as well as a user ID and password.

NeonKUBE includes the infrastructure required to authenticate users against external OAuth providers like GitHub, Google, Microsoft as well as enterprise solutions like Active Directory. Unfortunately, we haven't enabled this support yet so we rely on internal cluster authentication against a root user.

We currently generate a secure password for the root user. You can obtain this using the NeonDESKTOP Copy/SSO password to clipboard menu and then pasting that into the dashboard's login window. For clusters deployed via NeonCLI, you can locate the SSO password by searching for "ssoPassword" in the Kubernetes config file located at:

%USERPROFILE%\.kube\config

This isn't ideal or particularily secure and we plan on improving the installation process by integrating with external OAuth providers or at least prompting the user for a password rather than autogenerating one.

Cluster Hostname and IP Address​

The NeonDESKTOP virtual machine deployed to your computer can be accessed using the neon-desktop hostname or it's 100.64.0.254 IP address.

The SSH credentials for the virtual machine are:

username: sysadmin password: sysadmin0000

note

Your NeonDESKTOP cluster can only be accessed from your computer. Access from external devices via the LAN will be blocked.

This means that your NeonDESKTOP cluster will be as secure as your host computer.

It's not currently possible to access the desktop cluster from smartphones or other pyhysical devices. One workaround is to use a smartphone development emulator running on the same computer (which can be convienent when debugging).