K9s provides a curses based terminal UI to interact with your Kubernetes clusters. The aim of this project is to make it easier to navigate, observe and manage your applications. This command line app continually watches Kubernetes for changes and offers subsequent commands to interact with observed resources.

1. Homebrew (OSX)

brew tap derailed/k9s && brew install k9s

1. Binary Releases

• Releases

# List all available CLI options
k9s -h
# To get info about K9s runtime (logs, configs, etc..)
k9s config
# To run K9s in a given namespace
k9s -n mybitchns

• K9s uses 256 colors terminal mode. On `Nix system make sure TERM is set accordingly.

  export TERM=xterm-256color

• For clusters with many namespaces you can either edit ~/.k9s/config.yml or go to the namespace(ns) view to switch your default namespace to your namespace of choice using Ctrl-Switch. K9s keeps your top 10 favorite namespaces. Namespaces will get evicted from the top 10 list, based on your namespace switching frequency.

  k9s:
    refreshRate:   5   # K9s refresh rate in secs
    logBufferSize: 200 # Size of the logs buffer. Try to keep a sensible default!
    namespace:
      active: myCoolNS # Current active namespace name
      favorites:       # List of your 10 most frequently used namespaces
      - myCoolNS1
      - myCoolNS2
      - all
      - default
      - kube-system
    view:
      active: po       # Active resource view

• K9s can use $KUBECONFIG env var to load cluster information. However we've seen hill effects of using this env with multiple files as setting the current context may not update the correct file when using this technique.

K9s uses 2 or 3 letters alias to navigate most K8s resource.

K9s was built using go 1.11. In order to build K9 from source:

• Clone the repo
• Add the following command in your go.mod file

  replace (
    github.com/derailed/k9s => MY_K9S_CLONED_REPO
  )
  

• Build and run the executable

  go run main.go

• k9s Demo

This initial drop is brittle. K9s will most likely blow up if...

• K9s does not support multiple cluster config specified via KUBECONFIG env var
• You don't have enough RBAC fu to manage your cluster
• Your cluster does not run a metrics-server

This is still work in progress! If there is enough interest in the Kubernetes community, we will enhance per your recommendations/contributions. Also if you dig this effort, please let us know that too!

K9s sits on top of many of opensource projects and libraries. Our sincere appreciations to all the OSS contributors that work nights and weekends to make this project a reality!

• Email: [email protected]
• Twitter: @kitesurfer
• Web: K9s

© 2018 Imhotep Software LLC. All materials licensed under Apache v2.0