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

Extending Helm with plugins

Helm can be extended with plugins as well. Plugins are useful to extend Helm features that are not part of the Helm CLI, as Helm might not have everything that you need.

There is no central Helm plugins repository yet, where you would be able to see a list of all available plugins, nor is there a Helm plugin manager.

As most of the plugins are stored in GitHub repositories, and it is recommended to use the GitHub topic helm-plugin to label the plugin, you can easily search for available plugins there:

Figure 9.20 – Helm plugins search on GitHub

In the preceding screenshot https://github.com/search?q=helm-plugin was used to search for Helm plugins in GitHub.

Let's see how easy it is to install a Helm plugin:

$ helm plugin list

The output of the preceding command is shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 9.21 – Helm plugin helm-diff being installed

In the preceding command...