Getting started

Once you have installed kconnect you can see a list of the commands available by running:

kconnect help

NOTE: kconnect requires:

The general workflow for using kconnect is the following:

  • kconnect configure - import configuration that contains defaults for your organisation - 1 time
  • kconnect use - connect to a cluster for the first time - only the first time
  • kconnect to - use to reconnect to a cluster that you have already connected to - most used command day-to-day

Creating and importing configuration

Before using kconnect to connect to a Kubernetes cluster you may want to import an identity provider configuration with your (or your organisations) defaults so that you don’t have to supply all connection settings each time you connect to a new cluster.

You will need to create a configuration file (see example here). The configuration file can be imported from a local file or remote location via HTTP/HTTPS (and from stdin).

Each new user in your organization can then import the default configurations in this file using the kconnect configure command with the -f flag:

kconnect configure -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fidelity/kconnect/main/examples/config.yaml

Once the user has created their local configuration file, they should be able to display their configuration settings.

kconnect configure

First time connection to a cluster

When discovering and connecting to a cluster for the first time you can do the following:

kconnect use eks --idp-protocol saml

This will guide you interactively setting the flags and selecting a cluster. It also gives you the option to set an easy-to-remember alias.

NOTE: only saml is supported at present for IdP.

Reconnecting to a cluster

If you’ve previously connected to a cluster you can reconnect to it using the alias (if you set one):

kconnect to dev-bu-1

Or using the history id (which can be found by using kconnect ls):

kconnect to 01EM615GB2YX3C6WZ9MCWBDWBF

Setting Flags

Flags can be replaced with environment variables by following the format UPPERCASED_SNAKE_CASE and appending to the KCONNECT_ prefix.

For example --username can be set as KCONNECT_USERNAME; or --idp-protocol as KCONNECT_IDP_PROTOCOL.