When working on a platform like the Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP), plenty of kubeconfigs end up in your home directory. Some of them long-lived, some already outdated 30 minutes later.
Previously, I have been handling this with a couple of shell aliases and an occasional rm -rf ~/Downloads/kubeconfig-*. But I would not be a software engineer if I hadn’t been obsessed with optimizing my personal workflows. There is a good reason the profession likes to bikeshed some things to death. And we like to have, uhm, … special workflows.
Since I am no exception to all of that, I decided to write my own application to manage kubeconfigs. Enter kubeconfig-bikeshed – shorthand kbs. My way of keeping my bikes kubeconfigs organized and out of the rain (so they don’t rust – you want to guess what programming language it is written in?)
Let’s take a look at kbs in its current state, where I want it to go and why I want to work on it. Right now, the project is in its infancy, but I hope to make it actually useful in the future.
What is kbs?
The initial v0.1 version comes with admittely a very slim feature set. There are essentially three commands in kbs (ignoring help and shell completion related ones):
kbs import takes the path to a kubeconfig anywhere on your system (for example in ~/Downloads) and copies it to a central “store” that kbs is using. That store is in ~/.config/kbs by default, but respects XDG_CONFIG_HOME. While importing, the kubeconfig and context names get overridden with the server name. This is one of the things I kept doing when downloading kubeconfigs, and I often found the FQDN that is hosting the Kubernetes API to be the most “accurate” descriptor of a kubeconfig. If that is not suitable, the --name flag allows to set a name explicitly.kbs list lists the available kubeconfigs from the “store”. It is not very useful on its own, but mostly for scripting purposes and in combination with the next command.kbs use, which prints a shell snippet to export a kubeconfig from the store by name to the KUBECONFIG environment variable.
At the moment, the tool is restricted to import “simple” kubeconfigs, which means they can only have one cluster and one user entry. In the future I hope to improve on this.
This is the baseline for my tool, and thus the v0.1 release. In coming releases, I want to add a boatload of features:
- flags to change behavior of commands (e.g.
--short on kbs import to just use the first portion of the server FQDN as name).
- let
kbs use remember the last active kubeconfig and add kbs use - to “restore” the last selected kubeconfig.
- add a command to fetch kubeconfigs from remote systems (e.g. for a user cluster in KKP).
- add a command to “prune” outdated kubeconfigs. The semantics of that are still not fully settled in my head, but I can see it trying to establish a HTTPS connection to the Kubernetes API to decide if the server still exists.
- a way to manually clean up kubeconfigs (without going to
~/.config/kbs manually).
- perhaps a way to attach metadata to kubeconfigs when importing them. This could be useful to categorize and filter kubeconfigs, e.g. exclude any kubeconfig that has a
vpn=internal flag from being pruned.
While writing this section, new ideas come up every second. There is a lot of potential in kbs that I hope to explore.
Installation
kbs can be installed via brew (if you have Homebrew) or cargo (if you are on Linux and have a working Rust toolchain), depending on what system you are on. For brew, installation is as simple as:
$ brew tap embik/tap
$ brew install kubeconfig-bikeshed
Getting the tap up and running was relatively simple, but writing the formula for a Rust binary was surprisingly difficult to get right. When you search for that online, you run into tons of outdated advice. Maybe this should be the topic for another blog post once I feel more comfortable with it.
With cargo, it is even simpler after pushing my first crate to crates.io:
$ cargo install kubeconfig-bikeshed
After installation, I highly recommend to set up shell integration. For example for zsh, add the following snippet to your .zshrc:
# load kubeconfig-bikeshed shell completion & magic
if command -v kbs &>/dev/null
then
source <(kbs shell completion zsh)
source <(kbs shell magic zsh)
fi
But wait … what is kbs shell magic zsh?
Shell magic
One of the more interesting bits in kbs is the optional shell “magic”. It allows the user to run kbs to select a kubeconfig and set it for further use with e.g. kubectl. For zsh, it is loaded in the snippet above. For bash, it can be loaded via kbs shell magic bash.
As with all good magic, the actual trick is very simple. This defines a function called kbs in bash:
alias _inline_fzf="fzf --height=50% --reverse -0 --inline-info --border"
alias _kbs_bin="$(type -p kbs)"
function kbs() {
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
# if no parameters are passed, we want to run fzf on available kubeconfigs and set the selected one as active kubeconfig
eval "$(_kbs_bin use $(_kbs_bin ls | _inline_fzf))"
else
# if parameters are passed, we just call the kbs binary directly
${_kbs_bin} $@
fi
}
This acts like a shim between the user and the actual kbs binary. This is necessary for actually setting the KUBECONFIG environment variable, which feels like a core functionality of any good kubeconfig manager. You cannot set environment variables from within an application, so this function runs kbs ls to list available kubeconfigs, pipes them through fzf so the user can interactively search and select one, and then exports the full path as KUBECONFIG (kbs use prints something like export KUBECONFIG=path/to/kubeconfig that is going through eval and applied to the current shell).
This only happens when kbs (the shell function now) is called without arguments. if it is called with any arguments, they are passed through to the kbs binary.
The neat trick I learned while working on this is the use of proper shell built-ins. which is the much more popular command to determine where and if a command exists. However, since this is overriding the kbs command with a function, it needs to know where the kbs binary is. type -p does exactly that by simply looking for binaries, and not checking the shell itself.
Note that while type is a unix standard built-in, it works differently across shells. The zsh magic for example uses whence instead of type, because type prints not only the path:
$ type -p kbs
kbs is /opt/homebrew/bin/kbs
Since shell magic is per shell, I can get away with not using type where it doesn’t suit what I need.
Why write your own
Because it is fun. No, seriously. Working in an established ecosystem like Cloud Native can be a challenge sometimes, even though it is a relatively young space. Do not see this as a complaint – Collaboration, discussions, guard rails and architecture considerations are vital to good software. And I enjoy being involved in them.
But writing my own tools can be refreshing. They can do exactly what I want them to do, scratching that super specific itch I have. If people feel the same way I do about those itches, they are very welcome to use kbs. If they feel it doesn’t scratch their itch, they can use another tool or write their own. Or fork kbs. Finding a personal workflow that works has many ways.
Our industry is split on “Not Invented Here” (NIH) syndrome. Some organizations extensively suffer from it, while others are avoiding it – with mostly good reasons – like the plague. I believe collaboration between people with diverse backgrounds and corporate culture always produces the best outcome and should be the default choice over building it on your own. But I think if I can get away with NIH anywhere, it is tools used in personal workflows.
Learning by doing
The way I learn – and I assume most do – is by doing. Rust is one of those programming languages. The ones I have been aware of for years, but never really got into over all those years. The first time I tried to get into Rust was with nightshift, a tool to reduce blue light emissions when using sway as your window manager on Linux. That repository was created six years ago! And it never really got anywhere because I struggled with the language a lot. Since then I have used Rust for a small tool called ing-csv-importer which frankly speaking could have been a shell script.
But I still wanted to learn Rust! And I was bothered by my kubeconfig (mis-)management. The obvious solution to both problems was to combine them. Since I had a rough idea of what the tool should be capable of, the Rust learning process was much more guided. I knew what to look for. The code itself is probably terrible to experienced Rustaceans, but it works and I have already learned a lot about Rust from it. I hope to refine it in the future.
kbs is a “low impact” learning project. I had the idea back in May of 2023. Set up the repository, pulled in some dependencies and called it a day. But since there was no pressure to come back to it, I was able to take my time and get back into it once I was motivated. No one cared if I delivered “on time”, and so I was able to get back into it half a year later.
And after a couple of days of ramp up, I have to say I am delighted with Rust. The language has a certain elegance to it that I cannot explain. But I enjoy concepts like match that make for really nice code. Consider for example the snippet below, which determines the name variable used for a kubeconfig and its context depending on whether the --name flag is set:
let name: String = match matches.get_one::<String>("name") {
Some(str) => str.clone(),
None => {
let hostname = kubeconfig::get_hostname(&kubeconfig)?;
let url = Url::parse(hostname.as_str())?;
let host = url
.host_str()
.ok_or("failed to parse host from server URL")?;
host.to_string()
}
};
This feels so much less clunky to me than an if block in Go, for example. Is that “factually” correct? Maybe not. But Rust has a lot of concepts that I never knew I missed from other languages and I expect to do more work with it in the future.
Closing thoughts
Does kbs do something special? Absolutely not. If people are looking for a mature kubeconfig management solution, they are – at the moment, and maybe forever – better off with konf-go. But the work on this is a lot of fun and gives a certain feeling of self-empowerement once I had “finished” the v0.1.0 release end-to-end (from first commit to available Homebrew package).
Now I am excited to integrate kbs into my daily workflow and improve it where necessary. I plan to maintain it as long as I am working with masses of kubeconfigs, which I sincerely hope won’t change in the near future.
Anyways, I wish some people find use in kbs or the inspiration to start their own learning projects (or not; enjoy your free time with whatever makes you happy). Oh, and regarding that list of programming languages I want to get into – I’m coming for you next, Elixir and/or Gleam (once I get kbs where I want it to be, but … details, am I right?)