u/ButterTacoA_

I’m rebuilding my homelab from scratch using Infrastructure as Code.

At this point, OpenTofu is provisioning all of my Proxmox VMs, and I’m using Talos OS for Kubernetes. The infrastructure side is working, and I’m now at the stage where I need to bootstrap the cluster itself.
This is where I’m unsure about the “proper” approach.

My plan is to have Argo CD to manage everything inside Kubernetes, but something has to get me from a fresh Talos cluster to an operational Argo CD installation. My initial thought was to have a bootstrap script that installs/configures the essentials (for example, Cilium and Argo CD via Helm), after that Argo CD takes over. However, I’m wondering if there’s a cleaner or more idiomatic approach.

For those of you running GitOps-first homelabs or production clusters:
How do you bootstrap a brand-new cluster?
Do you use a one-time script, OpenTofu/Terraform providers, Helm, or something else?
Where do you draw the line between infrastructure provisioning and GitOps?

Thanks for any and all input/insight! It was much fun learning IaC / opentofu up to this point

I already run Traefik for my homelab and am adding a Kubernetes cluster to learn k8s. Most of my services are on VMs/LXCs, so I’d prefer to keep Traefik where it is. Is it possible to keep Traefik external and route traffic to services running inside Kubernetes, or does Traefik really need to be deployed as an ingress controller inside the cluster? I’m hard pressed to believe having 2 instances of Traefik is a logical choice cause that just feels redundant. But since I don’t have any real k8s knowledge, throwing Traefik into it makes the cluster a lot harder to freely break.