K8s Tools — K9s, Terminal Based UI to Manage Your Cluster

Introduction to K9s CLI, a K8s management tool

Full mind map is at: “K8s Tools Mind Map”

What is K9s?

K9s (https://k9scli.io/) provides a terminal UI to interact with your K8s clusters. The aim of K9s is to make it easier to navigate, observe and manage your applications in the wild. K9s continually watches your K8s clusters for changes and offers subsequent commands to interact with your observed resources.

K9s has the following good features:

• Provides standard cluster management commands such as logging, scaling, port forwarding and restarting.
• Allows you to define your own command shortcuts for quick navigation via command aliases and hotkeys.
• Provides a powerful filtering mode that allows users to drill down and view workload-related resources.
• Support for viewing RBAC rules such as clusters/roles and their associated bindings. Reverse lookups assert what a user/group or ServiceAccount can do on the cluster.
• Tracks in real-time activities of resources running in your Kubernetes cluster.

The following is an example of listing all Pods in the cluster:

Pic from k9s

How to Install K9s

K9s is available on Linux, macOS and Windows platforms.

Binary Install

For binary install (as tarballs), you can download the package from this url (https://github.com/derailed/k9s/releases):

I will demo the v0.26.7 Linux installation here. The installation steps looks like:

Download source:

$ wget https://github.com/derailed/k9s/releases/download/v0.25.18/k9s_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
--2023-01-16 15:18:52--  https://github.com/derailed/k9s/releases/download/v0.25.18/k9s_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
Resolving github.com (github.com)... 140.82.113.4
...
2023-01-16 15:13:39 (89.9 MB/s) - ‘k9s_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz’ saved [17653727/17653727]