3 basic Kubernetes shortcuts for faster command line kung fu

Tips and tricks to get faster with the Kubernetes Command Line.

I’ve been using Kubernetes now since the early betas, and over the years I’ve used kubectl a lot. But, developers and sysadmins who do things more than once learn to automate, or at least learn how to get much faster. Here is what I’ve picked up;

Alias kubectl

This is a time-saver that first looks dumb… but I think it adds up to a real time savings. Instead of,kubectl get pods I type, k get pods. I find also my brain has to think that little less about starting the command, and more about what I’m looking for — pods, services, etc.

user@host: alias k=kubectl
user@host: k get pods
...

This will persist until you log out. To save this alias, add it to your .bashrc or .profile file.

Also, protip, alias ka=kubeadm too!

Change namespace — kubens (or kns!)

This is another real time saver if you spend a lot of time jumping between namespaces like I do. I spend most of my time with OpenShift, so I was used to tying oc project foo . Imagine my surprise when the syntax for vanilla kubernetes is;

user@host: kubectl config set-context --current --namespace foo

No way am I typing that all the time, life is too short. Let’s do this instead;

user@host: alias kubens='kubectl config set-context --current --namespace '
user@host: alias kns=kubens

Now, let’s see what that looks like;

user@host: kns olive-tin 
Context "olive-tin/api-ocp-teratan-net:6443/kube:admin" modified. 
user@host: kns default 
Context "olive-tin/api-ocp-teratan-net:6443/kube:admin" modified.

I picked this one from Diego Mendes on StackOverflow, thank you for many hours of my life back, Diego!

And then I found this fantastic repository; https://github.com/ahmetb/kubectl-aliases . They’re using this same logic for kg (kubectl get), kd (kubectl describe), krm (kubectl delete/rm) and many more.

Learn the shortcuts for resource types

It’s fine if you type k get pods all the time, that is easy enough. But k get configmaps , k get services, k get clusteroperators? There is a faster way — all these resources have a shorter version;

user@host: k get cm # configmaps
user@host: k get svc # services
user@host: k get co # cluster operators (OpenShift)

Summary

I hope those 3 shortcuts work for you, although there are so many others I could have mentioned.

Note: I wrote this article from the top of my head, and then in searching for more tips and tricks to add, I actually found quite a few other similar articles with almost identical tips. Sorry, I wasn’t original, purely by an accident — nevertheless I hope the tips helped you!