kubectl commands to remember

Easy kubectl commands

This is a short list of kubectl commands that I use frequently. The idea of this blog post is to save me from searching my Notepad++ tabs looking for random notes I’ve taken in the last few weeks/months.

Quickly launch a troubleshooting pod

Here is a command to give you a command line at a pod with curl installed: kubectl run -i --tty curl --image=curlimages/curl --restart=Never --rm -- sh

Here is a command that will do a nslookup from within a pod in the cluster. Edit the DNS record as appropriate:

kubectl run -i dnsutils \
  --image=gcr.io/kubernetes-e2e-test-images/dnsutils:1.3 \
  --rm \
  -- nslookup backend-service.jobs.svc.cluster.local

Quickly enable autocompletion

source <(kubectl completion bash) # set up autocomplete in bash into the current shell, bash-completion package should be installed first.
echo "source <(kubectl completion bash)" >> ~/.bashrc # add autocomplete permanently to your bash shell.
bash # reload bash shell

Otherwise use the cheat sheet from the docs: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet/