Tools that make my life easier to work with kubernetes

I work on kubernetes a lot and here are list of tools that makes my life easier to build and manage.

• Autocompletion in the shell — I use oh-myzsh and I can’t think of typing or copy pasting each and every podname. So I use kubectl plugin for autocompletion https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/blob/master/plugins/kubectl/kubectl.plugin.zsh

kubetail

• Tailing logs — This is game changer with respect to tailing logs from multiple pods in one window — https://github.com/johanhaleby/kubetail .

kubetail nginx
# filter by containers with in pods 
kubetail l5d -c l5d

kubernetes context

• Pimp my context — I work with multiple k8s environments, I would have to know which one I am working with and someone had tweeted this script. I have it in my .oh-my-zsh/themes/agnoster.zsh-theme . This context shows the k8s context and the current namespace.

prompt_kubecontext() {
        prompt_segment white black "k8s-`kubectl config current-context`/`kubectl config get-contexts --no-headers | grep '*' | awk '{print $5}'`"
}
## Main prompt
build_prompt() {
  RETVAL=$?
  prompt_status
  prompt_dir
  prompt_git
  prompt_kubecontext
  prompt_end
  
}
PROMPT='%{%f%b%k%}$(build_prompt) '

• Manage Secrets — This is a handy tool to manage secrets in k8s https://github.com/dtan4/k8sec , it always handy to decode secrets instead of doing bunch jq or jsonpath .
• Port Forwarding — Some of the services/pods are internal and aren’t available via LB and I can’t really remember the kubectl port-forward command. So here is my script that makes port-forwarding easy.

#Port forward to linkerd
l5admin(){ kportforward l5d admin app=l5d 9000}
#clean up l5d admin port forwarding
l5clean(){lsof -t -i tcp:9000 | xargs kill}
#Port forward k8s
# $1 servicename
# $2 portname
# $3 pod selector
# $4 local port
kportforward() {
ADMINPORT=$(kubectl get svc $1  -o json |jq '.spec.ports[]| select(.name=="'$2'").port')
POD=$(kubectl get pods  --selector $3 \
  -o template --template '{{range .items}}{{.metadata.name}} {{.status.phase}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}' \
  | grep Running | head -1 | cut -f1 -d' ')
kubectl port-forward  $POD $4:$ADMINPORT &
sleep 2
open http://localhost:9000
}

• kubectl hacks — Some of the kubectl hacks that makes life easier

#copy remote file locally
kubectl cp pod:/remote-file /local/file
#verbose kubectl
kubectl  --v=8 version