Copy microk8s.kubectl config to Windows kubectl

For testing purposes, I recently installed Kubernetes on an Ubuntu Server VM, running on my XEN Server, through the use of the Microk8s package:

https://microk8s.io/

Installation was a breeze, and I quickly got Kubernetes up and running and was able to interact with it using microk8s.kubectl. Microk8s.kubectl is a version of kubectl having it’s own configuration pointing to the locally installed Kubernetes. This avoid conflicting with the standard kubectl which would have had its configuration overwritten by the microk8s package.

On my Windows developer PC, I wanted the ability to access the cluster using kubectl without having to run microk8s.kubectl through an SSH session.

To do this, one first have to find the kubectl config yaml file. This resides in the %userprofile%\.kube directory. If the file is not there, create it.

Configuration of the file to match that of microk8s.kubectl can be done copy paste the configuration of microk8s.kubectl and replace localhost with the external IP of the cluster. This can be done through SSH using the config view command.

$ microk8s.kubectl config view

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    server: https://<externalip>:<externalport>
  name: microk8s-cluster
contexts:
- context:
    cluster: microk8s-cluster
    user: admin
  name: microk8s
current-context: microk8s
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: admin
  user:
    password: <password>
    username: admin

Now, copy paste to the config file on Windows, and replace localhost with the external IP of the cluster.

In addition, if the SSL certificate is untrusted on the cluster (which it typically is), make sure to add insecure-skip-tls-verify: true under the cluster part.

The final config file should look like this:

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    insecure-skip-tls-verify: true
    server: https://<externalip>:<externalport>
  name: microk8s-cluster
contexts:
- context:
    cluster: microk8s-cluster
    user: admin
  name: microk8s
current-context: microk8s
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: admin
  user:
    password: <password>
    username: admin

If everything is well, executing kubectl get services on Windows should return at-least the Kubernetes service.