Basic development setup

For this workshop, we rely on a very basic local development setup - so to get started, all you need is a terminal (e.g. iTerm2 or PowerShell).

We’ve already prepared a cluster for you to deploy to, along with user accounts for Gitlab. After receiving your access credentials, you can:

  1. Sign into Gitlab.

  2. Connect to your cluster by running

export KUBECONFIG=<path of your kubeconfig>
  1. Double check if you are connected to the right cluster by
kubectl config current-context

Pro-Tip: Make your life easier with k9s

So far, we’ve primarily interacted with our cluster using kubectl, e.g. to check the status of Pods or Deployments. However, this comes pretty unhandy, especially when you need to quickly navigate and inspect different resources.

We at b’nerd hence love k9s, a terminal-based UI for Kubernetes, and want to encourage you to install (it does not take long) and try it out during our workshop.

Some handy k9s shortcodes for starters

Shortcut Description
:pods Jump directly to the Pods view
:deploy Jump to Deployments
:svc View Services
:ing View Ingresses
d Describe selected resource (kubectl describe)
e Edit selected resource
l View logs of the selected Pod/Container
s Shell into selected Pod (if shell is available)
/ Filter/search in the current view
: Command prompt for quick navigation
q Go back / Exit subview