Essential Kubectl commands

For Pods and Container Introspection

Command	Function
kubectl get pods	Lists all current pods
kubectl describe pod<name>	Describes pod names
kubectl get rc	Lists all replication controllers
kubectl get rc –namespace=”namespace”	Lists replication controllers in a namespace
kubectl describe rc <name>	Shows the replication controller name
kubectl get svc	Lists services
kubectl describe svc<name>	Shows a service name
kubectl delete pod<name>	Deletes a pod
kubectl get nodes -w	Watches nodes continuously

For Debugging

Function	Command
To execute the command on service by selecting a container	kubectl exec<service><commands>[-c< $container>]
To get logs from the service for a container	kubectl logs -f<name>>[-c< $container>]
To watch kubelet logs	watch -n 2 cat/var/log/kublet.log
To show metrics for a node	kubectl top node
To show metrics for a pod	kubectl top pod

For Cluster Introspection

Function	Command
To get version-related information	kubectl version
To get cluster-related information	kubectl cluster-info
To get configuration details	kubectl config g view
To get information about a node	kubectl describe node<node>

Objects

Some of the common objects used in Kubernetes are mentioned in the below table:

All	clusterrolebindings	clusterroles
cm= conf gmaps	controllerrevisions	crd=custom resource definition
Cronjobs	cs=component statuses	csr= certificate signing requests
Deploy=deployments	ds= daemon sets	ep=end points
ev= events	hpa= horizontal pod autoscaling	ing= ingress
jobs	limits=limit ranges	Netpol- network policies
No = nodes	ns= namespaces	pdb= pod distribution budgets
po= pods	Pod preset	Pod templates
Psp= pod security policies	Pv= persistent volumes	pvc= persistent volume claims
quota= resource quotas	rc= replication controllers	Role bindings
roles	rs= replica sets	sa= service accounts
sc= storage classes	secrets	sts= stateful sets

Other Quick Commands

Additionally, we do have some quick commands that are often very useful:

Function	Command
To launch a pod with a name and an image	kubectl run<name> — image=<image-name>
To create a service described in <manifest.yaml>	kubectl create -f <manifest.yaml>
To scale the replication counter to count the number of instances	kubectl scale –replicas=<count>rc<name>
To map the external port to the internal replication port	expose rc<name> –port=<external>–target-port=<internal>
To stop all pods in <n>	kubectl drain<n>– delete-local-data–force–ignore-daemonset
To create a namespace	kubectl create namespace <namespace>
To allow the master node to run pods	kubectltaintnodes –all-node-role.kuernetes.io/master-