Introduction

Managing Kubernetes clusters means interacting with dozens/hundreds/thousands of resources on a daily basis. These can be quite cumbersome to deal with and the amount of commands to memorize is insanely extensive. To alleviate this load, I’ll describe here what I use to make this easier.

Fubectl

This brings many nice aliases that will speed things up in terms of typing;

My highlighted ones are

  1. k
    • Shorter for kubectl
  2. kcs
    • Change active cluster e.g. docker-desktop,staging,production
  3. kcns
    • Change active namespace e.g. default,service-a,service-b

It does also bring important variables $(kube_ctx_namespace) that can be used in PS1 for showing the current context and namespace.

PS1

This is extremely helpful to display on your terminal, before you run any command, what’s the context in which you would run it. e.g.

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# "staging" is the cluster set by "kcs"
# "default" is the namespace set by "kcns"
/Users/tom/dev/7onn.github.io  main ± ⛵staging/default Montag 2025-07-21 22:11:30 +0200
$ kubectl --help
...

There are easy solutions that can display these information for you like p10k or starship. But if you are looking for a low overhead on your terminal performance, here’s how I do it.

Or simply add this to you .zshrc

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RED="\033[0;31m"
GREEN="\033[0;32m"
YELLOW="\033[0;33m"
BLUE="\033[0;34m"
MAGENTA="\033[0;35m"
CYAN="\033[0;36m"
WHITE="\033[0;37m"
RESET="\033[0m"
PURPLE="\033[38;5;183m"

function dir_ps1() {
  echo -e "${PURPLE}⭐$(pwd)${RESET}"
}

function git_ps1() {
  branch=$(git branch 2>/dev/null | sed -n '/^\*/s/^\* //p')
  if [[ -n "$branch" ]]; then
    if [[ -n "$(git diff --name-only HEAD)" ]]; then
      echo -e "${YELLOW}\UE0A0 ${branch} ±${RESET}
"
    else
      echo -e "${YELLOW}\UE0A0 ${RESET}${branch}${RESET}
"
    fi
  fi
}

function kube_ps1() {
  local ctx="$(kube_ctx_name)"
  if [[ -n "$ctx" ]]; then
    local ns="$(kube_ctx_namespace)"
    if [[ "$ctx" == *"production"* ]]; then
      echo -e "${RED}⛵${ctx}${RESET}/${CYAN}${ns}${RESET}"
    else
      echo -e "${GREEN}⛵${ctx}${RESET}/${CYAN}${ns}${RESET}"
    fi
  fi
}


function _update_ps1() {
  PS1="%1 
$(dir_ps1) $(git_ps1) $(kube_ps1) $(date +'%A %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z')
$ "
}

autoload -Uz add-zsh-hook
add-zsh-hook precmd _update_ps1

imho, the nicest thing on this PS1 is that it prints “production” in red color to decrease your chances of running things in the wrong place.

K9s

This will help you to things quickly like e.g. jump through resources, switch between apps’ logs, port-forward, describe, edit, and delete.

My highlighted commands are

  1. Check most resource consuming pods
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$ k9s -A
...
# Type :pods to search pods
# Type SHIFT+C to sort by CPU
# Type SHIFT+M to sort by Memory
  1. Check logs
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$ k9s
...
# Type :pods, :deploy, :sts, :ds, :cj, or :job to search for workloads
# Type "l" over the selected workload
# Type "w" to print the whole log line