How to switch kubectl clusters between gcloud and minikube

Question

I have Kubernetes working well in two different environments, namely in my local environment (MacBook running minikube) and as well as on Google\'s Container Engine (GCE, Kubern

Answer 1

The canonical answer of switching/reading/manipulating different kubernetes environments (aka kubernetes contexts) is, as Mark mentioned, to use kubectl config, see below:

$ kubectl config                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
Modify kubeconfig files using subcommands like "kubectl config set current-context my-context"

Available Commands:
  current-context Displays the current-context
  delete-cluster  Delete the specified cluster from the kubeconfig
  delete-context  Delete the specified context from the kubeconfig
  get-clusters    Display clusters defined in the kubeconfig
  get-contexts    Describe one or many contexts
  rename-context  Renames a context from the kubeconfig file.
  set             Sets an individual value in a kubeconfig file
  set-cluster     Sets a cluster entry in kubeconfig
  set-context     Sets a context entry in kubeconfig
  set-credentials Sets a user entry in kubeconfig
  unset           Unsets an individual value in a kubeconfig file
  use-context     Sets the current-context in a kubeconfig file
  view            Display merged kubeconfig settings or a specified kubeconfig file

Usage:
  kubectl config SUBCOMMAND [options]

Behind the scene, there is a ~/.kube/config YAML file that stores all the available contexts with their corresponding credentials and endpoints for each contexts.

Kubectl off the shelf doesn't make it easy to manage different kubernetes contexts as you probably already know. Rather than rolling your own script to manage all that, a better approach is to use a mature tool called kubectx, created by a Googler named "Ahmet Alp Balkan" who's on Kubernetes / Google Cloud Platform developer experiences Team that builds tooling like this. I highly recommend it.

https://github.com/ahmetb/kubectx

$ kctx --help                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
USAGE:
  kubectx                       : list the contexts
  kubectx                 : switch to context 
  kubectx -                     : switch to the previous context
  kubectx =     : rename context  to 
  kubectx =.          : rename current-context to 
  kubectx -d  [] : delete context  ('.' for current-context)
                                  (this command won't delete the user/cluster entry
                                  that is used by the context)

  kubectx -h,--help         : show this message