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Initial packages to confgure in Debian Buster

There are some missing tools that should be installed after the firs installation of Debian:

  • Curl
  • VIM
  • Docker (if you are planning to run containers)
  • Kubeclt
  • Helm
  • Install GCloud SDK
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Minikube

Enable sudo for your user

Login as root and edit /etc/sudoers:

...
# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
david   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
...

Debian packages

It is highly recommended to do a previous update:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Also, install curl as the first package, because it will be used to add some repos:

sudo apt install curl

Now let's add some repos:

curl https://baltocdn.com/helm/signing.asc | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://baltocdn.com/helm/stable/debian/ all main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/helm-stable-debian.list
curl -s https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list
sudo apt update

Now, install some packages:

sudo apt install -y \
apt-transport-https \
vim \
helm \
docker.io \
kubectl

Configure Docker

You need to add your user to the docker group that should have been created in the previous docker.io package installation:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Visual Studio Code

curl -s -L https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=760868 -o vscode.deb
sudo dpkg -i vscode.deb

Change Python version

Debian Buster installs Python with different versions. Depending on the version, Python 2 is the default one, and we are going to set Python 3 as default. So check the current version and that python3 is already installed

$ ls -l /usr/bin/python3 && python --version
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mar 26  2019 /usr/bin/python3 -> python3.7
Python 2.7.16

We are then moving Python 2.7.16 to Python 3.7 as default:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python2.7 1
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python3.7 2

The end number is the priority (highest priority), so the --install is using the number 2 (python3) as the default. We check now the default installation:

$ python --version
Python 3.7.3
$ update-alternatives --list python
/usr/bin/python2.7
/usr/bin/python3.7

Installing Minikube

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube_latest_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i minikube_latest_amd64.deb