Getting Edgy: What is Kubectl? (2024)

GETTING EDGY

Kubectl is a command line tool used to run commands against Kubernetes clusters. It does this by authenticating with the Master Node of your cluster and making API calls to do a variety of management actions. If you’re just getting started with Kubernetes, prepare to be spending a lot of time with kubectl!

How to Use kubectl

The format of a kubectl command looks like this:

kubectl[command][type][name][flags] 

• [command]: specifies the action you want to perform like create, delete, get, apply
• [type]: any Kubernetes resource, whether automatically provided by Kubernetes (like a service or a pod) or created by you with a Custom Resource Definition
• [name]: the name you have given the resource — if you omit the name, kubectl will return every resource specified by the type
• [flags]: specify any additional global or command specific options such as the output format

An example of a command using the full command format is

kubectl get pods hello-world -o yaml

which will make a call to the kubernetes api and output the configuration of a pod named hello-world in yaml format.

Since the name is optional, some commands you will commonly execute will completely omit it such as

kubectl apply -f hello-world.yaml

which will apply a configuration defined in the hello-world.yaml file.

Learn More

• https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/overview/
• https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/
• https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io

Other useful tools:

• kubectx & kubens
• kube-ps1
• autocomplete
• aliases
• stern

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