TIL: k9s plugins

k9s is an awesome terminal UI and tool to work with Kubernetes clusters. I’m using it daily for basically all my Kubernetes related work tasks.

Recently I learned there’s a super straight forward way of adding “plugins” to k9s, which are basically shortcuts for calling (shell) commands.

Take the following example from my $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/k9s/plugins.yaml file

grafana-pod:
    shortCut: Ctrl-L
    confirm: false
    description: Grafana
    scopes:
    - pods
    background: true
    command: open
    args:
    - https://my-grafana.tld/d/abcdefghi/my-dashboard?orgId=1&var-Datasource=prometheus-$CLUSTER&var-Namespace=$NAMESPACE&var-app_kubernetes_io_name=All&var-Pod=$COL-NAME&from=now-6h&to=now

Let’s have a look at each line:

• shortCut defines the key combination which invokes the plugin
• confirm can be true or false and will show a confirmation dialog if set to true before invoking the plugin
• description is the name shown in the UI
• scopes defines on what resources the plugin is available (will be hidden in the UI otherwise)
• background defines if the plugin runs in the background or re-uses the same terminal (minimising k9s)
• command is the command or tool to be invoked. It can be any command available in the shell, like open (to open a URL), kubectl, …
• args is a list of arguments passed to the command

When I hit CTRL-L, the open command is invoked and open Grafana in my browser. It passes all relevant variables to the dashboard:

• $CLUSTER is the name of the current cluster
• $NAMESPACE is the currently active namespace
• $COL-NAME is the Name in the current column (the selected pod in the list of pods)

It’s a super powerful shortcut do view metrics about a pod in an instant, and made my life a lot easier!

More fields can be seen in the documentation at https://k9scli.io/topics/plugins/

k9s itself is already a powerful tool, but this extensibility just makes it so much more flexible!

Additional links

• Community plugins
• k9s website