Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at kubectl Reference.

If you’re working with the NZRT Kubernetes cluster, kubectl is your main command-line tool. It’s how you talk to the cluster — listing what’s running, checking logs, deploying changes, and fixing problems. This episode walks you through the key commands grouped by what you’re trying to do.

Let’s start with getting and listing resources. This is probably the first thing you do when you sit down to check on the cluster. You can list pods, deployments, services, ingresses, config maps, secrets, persistent volume claims, and nodes — all within the nzrt-prod namespace. There’s also a shortcut to get everything in that namespace in one go, or if you need a full picture, you can pull everything across all namespaces at once. Think of these commands as your dashboard — a quick way to see what’s alive and what’s there.

Once you spot something you want to know more about, you move into the describe commands. Describing a resource gives you the detailed view — events, conditions, configuration specifics. You can describe a pod by name, a deployment, a node, or a service. This is especially useful when something isn’t behaving as expected and you need to dig past the surface-level status.

Next up is logs. When something goes wrong, logs are usually your first port of call. The basic version pulls logs from a named pod in nzrt-prod. If your pod is running multiple containers, you can specify which container you want logs from. If you want to watch logs live as they come in, there’s a follow mode — it streams new output to your terminal in real time, similar to tailing a file. And if a pod has already crashed, there’s a flag to pull the logs from the previous run, which is invaluable for diagnosing what went wrong before a restart.

Now for applying and deleting resources. When you have a manifest file — that’s a YAML file describing your Kubernetes resources — you can apply it to the cluster. Kubernetes will create or update whatever the file describes. You can also point at an entire directory of manifest files and apply them all at once. On the flip side, you can delete resources using the same manifest file, or delete a specific pod or deployment by name directly. Be careful with deletes — there’s no confirmation prompt, so make sure you know what you’re targeting.

The exec and port-forward commands are your tools for getting hands-on with a running pod. Exec lets you open an interactive shell session directly inside a container — either a basic shell or bash, depending on what the container has available. This is handy for inspecting files, running quick diagnostics, or testing connectivity from inside the cluster. Port-forward is different — it creates a tunnel from your local machine into the cluster. So if you specify local port 8080 mapping to port 80 on a pod or service, you can open your browser and hit that service directly from your laptop without exposing it externally. Really useful for testing.

Rollouts are how you manage deployments over time. You can check the status of a rollout to see if a deployment is progressing or stuck. You can view the rollout history to see previous versions. If something goes wrong after a deploy, you can undo it — this rolls the deployment back to its previous state. And if you want to update which container image a deployment is running, you can set that directly by specifying the deployment name, the container name, and the new image and tag.

Finally, output formats. By default kubectl gives you a summarised table view, but sometimes you need more. You can output a pod’s full configuration as YAML or JSON — useful if you want to inspect every field or save a copy. The wide output format adds extra columns to the default table, like which node a pod is running on. And you can show labels on your pods, which is helpful when you’re working with selectors or trying to understand how services are routing traffic.

That covers the full kubectl reference for NZRT cluster management. If you want to go deeper, the related wiki pages on the kubectl Cheatsheet and Cluster Overview are good next reads.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.