After evaluating several local Kubernetes solutions I encountered repeated manual steps (downloading bootstrap images, pulling images from registry mirrors and retagging them, and loading images into clusters) that were time-consuming and error-prone. I decided to set up a properly air-gapped Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm and containerd, leveraging containerd’s registry mirror support. This post documents the steps I followed. Prerequisites This guide assumes a Debian/Ubuntu host. Installing the latest Docker Engine will also provide containerd as a dependency.