ku: navigate Kubernetes from the terminal like a pro

I'm back working with Kubernetes. I have a locally deployed microsite architecture — several namespaces, deployments, services, ingresses — and needed a fast way to navigate everything without constantly running kubectl get and kubectl describe by hand. kubectl muscle memory is fine, but to move through a cluster fluently you need to see the whole picture.

I went to GitHub and found ku, a Kubernetes TUI by a Norwegian developer. It's fast, keyboard-only, and clearly inspired by k9s, Lens, and lazygit. I liked it from the first ku.

Installation¶

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bjarneo/ku/main/install.sh | sh

Or with Go:

go install github.com/bjarneo/ku@latest

What sold me¶

• Read-only by default. You start up and can't break anything. To edit, delete, or scale you have to enable edit mode with Shift+E. The header shows a green ● READ-ONLY or red ● EDIT chip so you always know what mode you're in. For those of us with butterfingers, this is peace of mind.

• Cockpit on launch. A cluster overview: server version, node status, live CPU and memory gauges, pods by phase, ready deployments, and recent warnings (deduplicated, with recurrence count). Auto-refreshes every few seconds.

• Tables with the right columns. Uses the same Table API representation as kubectl get, so columns are exactly what you expect for every resource. CRDs work too. Cells have semantic coloring: green for healthy, yellow for transient, red for broken. The sorted column shows its direction.

• lazygit-style layout: left panel with resource navigation, Tab to switch panes, bottom status bar showing only the keys relevant to your current selection.

• Curated summaries. Enter on an object opens a type-specific summary: pods show live usage, health, requests/limits; services, ingresses, configmaps, and secrets get purpose-built views. d or y opens the full YAML with syntax highlighting.

• Logs with follow. l on a pod streams logs. Filter with regex, copy lines, switch between current and previous instance, and toggle auto-scroll. All inside the TUI.

• Shell into pods and nodes. s on a pod opens an interactive shell (bash or sh) in an overlay with a virtual terminal. On a node, it spins up a privileged debug pod with chroot /host. Ctrl+\ detaches.

• Service port-forwarding. p on a Service and pick the port. Map 8080:http or 18080:80. Active forwards show in the header and you manage them from the command palette.

• Equivalent kubectl command. C shows the kubectl command that replicates the current view. Great for learning or copying to a script.

• Built-in Kubernetes docs. O opens the upstream docs for the selected resource in your browser.

• Customizable sidebar. ku config init generates ~/.config/ku/config.yaml where you can add CRDs to the sidebar. Supports group-qualified resources (scaledobjects.keda.sh, certificates.cert-manager.io).

• Developer mode. ku --dev hides cluster admin resources (nodes, PVs, namespaces, events) and disables node operations. For when you only manage your own apps.

• Remembers context and namespace. Persists them in ~/.config/ku/state.json between sessions.

What's missing (for now)¶

• No dependency graph or topology view.
• Port-forward is Services only, not individual pods.
• No Helm integration.

It's a young project (~500 stars, ~100 commits) but very well thought out. Using it feels like a tool that understands how you work with Kubernetes and removes friction at every step. For my current setup — a microsite architecture with multiple namespaces — it lets me jump between resources, follow logs, and check cluster health without leaving the terminal.

Original source: github.com/bjarneo/ku