Links: 111 KodeCloud Index

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• Using certificate and key for making a curl request

curl https://my-kube-playground:6443/api/v1/pods \
    --key admin.key
    --cert admin.crt
    --cacert ca.crt

• We can specify the same information using the kubectl command

kubectl get pods
    --server my-kube-playground:6443
    --certificate-authority ca.crt
    --client-key admin.key
    --client-certificate admin.crt

• Typing these in everytime is a tedious task so we move it to a kubeconfig file and then specify it while running the commands
  • k get pods --kubeconfig config

By default the kubeconfig looks for a file at ~/.kube/config

So if we have a kubeconfig file here named config we don't have to specify it everytime.

• The kubeconfig file is in a specific format. It contains 3 sections: Clusters, Users & Contexts

  • Context defines which user account will be used to access which cluster.
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• Sample kubeconfig file

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• Similarly we can add other clusters

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• Contexts need not be of the format <user>@<cluster> they can be simple words also. It is upto us what we want to name them.

How does kubectl know which context to choose from?

• We can specify the default context by adding it in the kubeconfig file under current-context

• View the current kubeconfig file: k config view
  • If we don't specify which file we want to use it will end up using the kubeconfig at the default location.
• Viewing a specific kubeconfig file: k config view --kubeconfig=myconfig
• We can change the current context using:
  • k config use-context <context>

Changes made by the kubectl actually reflects in the kubeconfig file.

• In each cluster we may have different namespaces. We can configure a context to switch to a particular namespace.

  • The context section in the kubeconfig file can take additional field called namespace.
  • So when we switch to that context we will automatically be in that namespace.
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• We should provide full path to the certificate.

• Optionally we can directly specify the contents of certificate in the kubeconfig file after base64 encoding it.
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Last updated: 2022-10-03