You should have a general understanding of what kubectl is and how it functions before exploring how to use it more effectively.
From a standard user’s viewpoint, kubectl is the control panel for Kubernetes. It helps you to run all Kubernetes operations. From a technical standpoint, Kubectl can be considered as a client to access the Kubernetes API.
Kubernetes’ API is a RESTful HTTP API. The actual Kubernetes user interface is this API. This API gives you total leverage over Kubernetes. This ensures that each Kubernetes process is revealed as an API endpoint that can be accessed with an HTTP request. As a result, Kubectl’s primary function is to make HTTP requests to the Kubernetes API.
The Kubernetes kubectl CLI allows one to communicate with Kubernetes clusters. It can be mounted on any desktop or workstation, allowing us to remotely control our Kubernetes cluster. With the help of the ‘use-context’ command, we can control several clusters from the same computer or workstation. It’s sometimes referred to as ‘Kube Control.’ We can handle nodes in the cluster by draining them for upkeep, updating a node’s taint, and so on. If we execute the kubectl command, it searches in the $HOME/.kube folder for the kubeconfig file.
Kubernetes is a resource-centric architecture at its heart. That is to say, Kubernetes keeps track of internal resource states, and all of its operations are basic CRUD operations that are performed on these resources. You can use the kubectl CLI to have a complete-command over these resources and can easily manipulate them. As a result, the Kubernetes API reference is structured as a collection of resource types and the operations that go with them.
The Kubectl Command Line tool is like a swiss army knife. Anything that you want to do with clusters of nodes in Kubernetes, you can do so with Kubectl. When you create clusters in Kubernetes, irrespective of the platform (cloud or on-premise), you will be interacting with the basic features and tools of Kubernetes using Kubectl CLI. After the creation of a cluster, credentials are generated that you need to plug into the CLI (Kubectl). Then you deploy workloads and play around with them. You then move on to testing or staging environments, create clusters there too, and manage them using the same Kubectl, and finally deploy them to production.
Kubectl Syntax and Parameters
Let’s discuss the basic general syntax that the kubectl command follows:
$ kubectl [command] [type] [name] [flags]
- The first parameter is the command parameter, which defines the operations that need to be performed on a cluster resource such as delete, get, describe, etc.
- The next one is the type parameter which states the type of resource. This can be pods, services, deployments, etc. For this, we can define the types in either singular form like pod or plural form like pods or even abbreviations like po.
- We can use the name parameter to define the name of the resource.
One of the most common kubectl sub-commands is the get command which can be used to list all the available pods in the cluster that are running with the default namespace. If you want to get details pertaining to a specific pod, you can just write a name after the command. The next one is using the –help flag that will display all the information along with the options and sub-commands that can be used with the kubectl command. Some other sub-commands include create, get, expose, run, edit, describe, scale, drain, taint, version, etc.
Wrapping Up
To conclude, Kubectl is a powerful CLI tool that allows you to manage or manipulate Kubernetes clusters with ease. In this article, we walked you through a basic introduction of the Kubectl Command Line tool and we also discussed the general syntax of the Kubectl command as well as the parameters that it supports. We hope that this article will give you a basic overview of what kubectl is and how you can easily manage Kubernetes clusters using this tool.