kubectl is a CLI utility for running commands against Kubernetes clusters. It’s required for many maintenance and administrative tasks in Rancher 2.x.

Installation

See kubectl Installation for installation on your operating system.

Configuration

When you create a Kubernetes cluster with RKE, RKE creates a kube_config_rancher-cluster.yml in the local directory that contains credentials to connect to your new cluster with tools like kubectl or helm.

You can copy this file to $HOME/.kube/config or if you are working with multiple Kubernetes clusters, set the KUBECONFIG environmental variable to the path of kube_config_rancher-cluster.yml.

  1. export KUBECONFIG=$(pwd)/kube_config_rancher-cluster.yml

Test your connectivity with kubectl and see if you can get the list of nodes back.

  1. kubectl get nodes
  2. NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION
  3. 165.227.114.63 Ready controlplane,etcd,worker 11m v1.10.1
  4. 165.227.116.167 Ready controlplane,etcd,worker 11m v1.10.1
  5. 165.227.127.226 Ready controlplane,etcd,worker 11m v1.10.1