The problem

As engineer who works with kubernetes everyday I use kubectl a lot. Actually, more than 50% of my terminal history commands are related to kubernetes. Here is a top 10 commands:

1	2079  46.7611%    kubectl
2	425   9.55915%    git
3	324   7.28745%    helm
4	156   3.50877%    cd
5	146   3.28385%    ssh
6	130   2.92398%    kctx
7	114   2.5641%     kns
8	80    1.79937%    gcloud-auth
9	78    1.75439%    curl
10	66    1.48448%    docker
...

Run this command if you are curious what about yours the most popular commands in terminal history.

I use kubectl to check status of the pods, delete orphaned resources, trigger sync on ExternalSecrets and much more. When I realized half my terminal history was just kubectl commands, I thought — there must be a better way to find things in Kubernetes without chaining pipes with grep / awk / xargs. And I imagined how nice it would be to have a UNIX find-like tool — something that lets you search for exactly what you need in the cluster and then perform actions directly on the matching resources. I searched for a krew plugin like this but there was not any. For that reason, I decided to develop one!

Development

I used sample-cli-plugin as a starting point. Its clean repository structure and straightforward design make it a great reference for working with the Kubernetes API. Additionally, it allows easy reuse of the extensive Kubernetes client libraries.

Almost everything in the Kubernetes ecosystem is written in Go, and this plugin is no exception — which is great, as it allows building binaries for a wide range of CPU architectures and operating systems.

Features overview

Filters

Find by resource name using regex

kubectl fd pods -r dev

Find pods with restarted containers

kubectl fd pods --restarted

Find pods with image matching regex

kubectl fd pods --image bitnami

Find pods by status

kubectl fd pods --status Pending

Find pods running on nodes matching regex

kubectl fd pods --node '*spot'

Find any resource by custom condition

Use jq filter to find any resource by any custom condition. kubectl-find uses gojq implementation of jq.

# find Services with trafficDistribution set to PreferClose
kubectl fd svc -j '.spec.trafficDistribution == "PreferClose"'

# find pods with unset nodeSelector
kubectl fd pods -j '.spec.nodeSelector == null' -A

# find pods with undefined resources
kubectl fd pods -j 'any( .spec.containers[]; .resources == {} )' -A

Actions

By default, fd will print found resources to Stdout. However, there flags that you can provide to perform action on found resources:

• --delete - to delete them
• --patch - to patch with provided JSON
• --exec - to run command on pods

Getting started

Use krew to install the plugin:

krew install fd

What’s next

I’m currently working on adding:

• JSON/YAML output format
• More filters
• Saved queries

If you’re tired of writing long kubectl | grep | xargs chains, give kubectl fd a try — it’s already saved me countless keystrokes.

Check out the repo ⭐ github.com/alikhil/kubectl-find and share your ideas or issues — I’d love to hear how you use it!