Introducing kubectl

You can use kubectl to deploy applications, inspect and manage them, check cluster resources, view logs, and more.

kubectl is a command-line tool that can run from your computer, in CI/CD pipelines, as part of the operating system, or as a Docker image. It is a very automation-friendly tool.

kubectl looks for a configuration file named .kube in the $HOME folder. In the .kube file, kubectl stores the cluster configurations needed to access a Kubernetes cluster. You can also set the KUBECONFIG environment variable or use the --kubeconfig flag to point to the kubeconfig file.