Book Image

kubectl: Command-Line Kubernetes in a Nutshell

By : Rimantas Mocevicius
Book Image

kubectl: Command-Line Kubernetes in a Nutshell

By: Rimantas Mocevicius

Overview of this book

The kubectl command line tool lets you control Kubernetes clusters to manage nodes in the cluster and perform all types of Kubernetes operations. This introductory guide will get you up to speed with kubectl in no time. The book is divided into four parts, touching base on the installation and providing a general overview of kubectl in the first part. The second part introduces you to managing Kubernetes clusters and working with nodes. In the third part, you’ll be taken through the different ways in which you can manage Kubernetes applications, covering how to create, update, delete, view, and debug applications. The last part of the book focuses on various Kubernetes plugins and commands. You’ll get to grips with using Kustomize and discover Helm, a Kubernetes package manager. In addition to this, you’ll explore how you can use equivalent Docker commands in kubectl. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to install and update an application on Kubernetes, view its logs, and inspect clusters effectively.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with kubectl
3
Section 2: Kubernetes Cluster and Node Management
6
Section 3: Application Management
10
Section 4: Extending kubectl

Installing plugins

A plugin in kubectl is just an executable file (it could be a complied Go program or a Bash shell script, among other things) the name of which begins with kubectl-, and to install the plugin you just have to put its executable file in a directory that's in your PATH variable.

The easiest way to find and install plugins is by using Krew (https://krew.sigs.k8s.io/), the Kubernetes plugin manager. Krew is available for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Krew is a Kubernetes plugin, so let's go ahead and install it. For this example, we are going to use macOS:

  1. To install Krew on macOS, run the $ brew install krew command as shown in the following screenshot:

    Figure 7.1 – krew install with brew on macOS

  2. Next, we need to download the plugin list:
    $ kubectl krew update
  3. When we have a locally cached list of all the plugins, let's check for available plugins by running the $ kubectl krew search command as shown in the following screenshot...