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.

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

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

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