Essential plugins for Kubectl CLI
This is a short article about handy plugins that can be used along with kubectl CLI , which helps you to can reduce a few of your operational tasks from an admin perspective. Basically, we can extend the capabilities kubectl with the power of plugins, like checking the deprecations of components in the cluster or SSHing to the nodes.
We can install plugins using a plugin manager called krew and there are quite a few available on the website listed here as well. Let's look at how we can get started with plugins :)
Setup
The plugins are added using krew and the primary requirement is to install krew them in the system. You can use the below code snippet in Mac/Linux to install it
(
set -x; cd "$(mktemp -d)" &&
OS="$(uname | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')" &&
ARCH="$(uname -m | sed -e 's/x86_64/amd64/' -e 's/\(arm\)\(64\)\?.*/\1\2/' -e 's/aarch64$/arm64/')" &&
KREW="krew-${OS}_${ARCH}" &&
curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/krew/releases/latest/download/${KREW}.tar.gz" &&
tar zxvf "${KREW}.tar.gz" &&
./"${KREW}" install krew
)Once you have krew it in the system, now it is time to install the additional plugins.
Plugins
There are many plugins available in the OSS GitHub repos, but below are some of my personal favorites.
- Kubepug
KubePug/Deprecations is intended to be a kubectl plugin, which:
- Downloads a swagger.json from a specific Kubernetes version
- Parses this Json finding deprecation notices
- Verifies the current kubernetes cluster or input files checking whether exists objects in this deprecated API Versions, allowing the user to check before migrating
kubectl krew install deprecations
#Usage
kubepug --k8s-version=v1.18.6 # Will verify the current context against v1.18.6 swagger.json2. net-forward
Simple plugin that lest you create a local port listener on your personal machine that redirects to an arbitrary TCP service that the Cluster can see. This is similar to kubectl port-forward without the restriction that forwarding can only use Pods or Services as destinations.
kubectl krew install net-forward
#Usage
kubectl net-forward -i 169.254.169.254 -p 3389 -l 3389I personally use this a lot to debug issues related to environment specific inside the Windows/Linux nodes.
Please feel to try out the plugins on the krew website also, as there are other plugins that could be beneficial to your work.
Hope this info was helpful and thanks for reading the article.!
References
In case of any queries, please feel to connect me via the below links
