Quickstart

This walks you from zero to a running cluster with one node attached. Budget about five minutes, most of which is a machine booting.

1. Create a control plane

Give it a name and a tier. Tiers are described in Tiers & pricing; small is the right place to start. Create it however you drive Longbridge:

lbr cp cluster create home --tier small

resource "longbridge_cluster" "home" {
name = "home"
tier = "small"
}

curl -X POST https://console.lngbrdg.com/api/v1/clusters \
-H "x-api-key: $LB_KEY" \
-d '{"name":"home","tier":"small"}'

In a few seconds you have a managed control plane. Merge its kubeconfig into your local config and switch to it:

lbr kubeconfig home
kubectl get nodes

You’ll see an empty cluster — no nodes yet. That’s next.

2. Join a node

Attach a machine with one command from your workstation:

lbr cp node attach home

It prints a one-liner to run on the node as root — it carries a single-use, one-hour join token and installs everything the worker needs:

curl -fsSL https://api.eu-hel.cp.lngbrdg.com/install.sh \
  | sudo bash -s -- --token <token> --k8s-version 1.34

The node dials out to the control plane and registers itself — NAT and home networks just work. Within a minute:

kubectl get nodes
# NAME        STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
# home-1      Ready    <none>   40s   v1.33.x

3. Deploy something

It’s a normal cluster. Deploy with the tools you already use:

kubectl create deployment hello --image=nginx
kubectl expose deployment hello --port 80
kubectl get pods -w

That’s it — a managed control plane, your own node, one kubeconfig.

Where to next

• Core concepts — the model behind what you just did.
• Scaling & redundancy — grow the control plane and add replicas when you need them.