K9s

K9s is an open source terminal app for working with Kubernetes clusters. It gives you a text-based dashboard for finding, viewing and changing the resources in your cluster.

K9s watches your cluster and updates its views as resources change. You move between pods, deployments, nodes and other objects with keyboard shortcuts, and you can read logs, scale workloads, restart them and set up port forwards from the same screen. It also handles custom resource definitions, so objects added by operators and extensions appear alongside the standard ones.

• Live view of resources as they change
• Logs, scaling, restarts and port forwards
• Cluster metrics for pods, containers and nodes
• Custom hotkeys, aliases and plugins
• Read RBAC rules and role bindings

Engineers and operators who work with Kubernetes every day and prefer a terminal. It suits people who want quick access to cluster state without typing long kubectl commands for each check.

K9s is free and released under the Apache License 2.0. It runs in a terminal on macOS, Linux and Windows, and it reads your existing kubeconfig file to connect. Its views only show what your Kubernetes permissions allow, so some resources may be hidden when you use a restricted account.