zadm/kexp

k'exp - Kubernetes Explorer

k'exp - Kubernetes Explorer

Understand Kubernetes - the visual way. Not yet another attempt to manage production clusters in the browser.

k'exp is for:

• Learning and exploring Kubernetes capabilities
• Application development (object graph presets for every app)
• Controller and operator development (dynamic object graphs)
• [coming soon] Postman-like client and request builder for Kubernetes API

k'exp can reflect the state of your cluster in real-time:

k'exp can also give you a quick overview of "related" objects:

...as well as show object-specific insights:

In the wild

You can try k'exp at every Kubernetes Playground on iximiuz Labs. Some tutorials also use k'exp to visualize Kubernetes objects and their relationships:

• Making Sense Out of Native Sidecar Containers in Kubernetes

You can also find a few short demos on YouTube.

Installation

Grab the latest release from GitHub:

GOOS=linux
GOARCH=amd64

curl -Ls https://github.com/iximiuz/kexp/releases/latest/download/kexp_${GOOS}_${GOARCH}.tar.gz | tar xvz

sudo mv kexp /usr/local/bin

At the moment, the only system kexp is actively tested on is Linux amd64, but builds for Darwin amd64/arm64 and Linux arm64 are also available.

Usage

It's a statically linked Go binary with an embedded UI. If you already have kubectl configured to access your cluster(s), you can run kexp too - it uses the same KUBECONFIG discovery logic.

By default, kexp starts a server on localhost:5173:

kexp

open localhost:5173

Alternatively, you can specify a custom address:

kexp --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8090

How it works

kexp is a daemon that uses the local KUBECONFIG to access Kubernetes API. Thus, it's as powerful (and potentially destructive!) as your kubectl can get. The daemon lists Kubernetes API resources and objects, may start a bunch of watchers for the objects of interest, and even delete objects if you ask it to (via the UI). The UI is a single-page application written in TypeScript and Vue and embedded into the daemon binary.

Development

Pre-requisites:

go install github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint@latest

cd ui
npm install

# Optional
kind create cluster
# ...or
minikube start

Running the dev server and the UI is easy:

# In terminal 1
make back-run-dev

# In terminal 2
make front-run-dev

After that, you can access the UI at http://localhost:5173.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!