Kubectl

Kubectl is the preferred k8s client used to interact with k8s objects. By default the kubectl client interacts with the cluster kubeconfig specified in the KUBECONFIG i.e export KUBECONFIG=/PATH/TO/KUBECONFIG.yaml environment variable file location or explicitly specify kubeconfig using the --kubeconfig <KUBE_CONFIG_FILE_LOCATION>

alias k='kubectl' # add to .bashrc or .zshrc

# Usage:
k get pods # instead of `kubectl get pods`

Structure of Command

kubectl [command] [TYPE] [NAME] [flags]

kubectl logs nginx-nxs1a -n test

# Command => create, get, describe, delete, run etc
# Type => configmaps, events, namespaces, nodes etc
# name => name of the k8s resource
# flags => additional flags for the kubectl i.e 

Detailed kubectl docs can be found in the link

k8s Object types/resources

available k8s objects/resource can be fetched using the command kubectl api-resources

Most commonly used ones are:

1. configmaps / cm
2. endpoints / ep
3. events / ev
4. namespaces / ns
5. nodes / no
6. persistentvolumeclaims / pvc
7. persistentvolumes / pv
8. pods / po
9. secrets
10. serviceaccounts
11. service / svc
12. customresourcedefinitions / crds
13. deployments / deploy
14. statefulsets / sts
15. horizontalpodautoscalers / hpa
16. cronjobs / cj
17. jobs
18. ingress / ing
19. storageclass / sc

kubectl flags

• For exhaustive flags list refer docs

Kubectl Examples