Install Kubectl and Helm Clients Directly on a Host¶

You can use kubectl and helm to interact with a controller from a remote system.

About this task

Commands such as those that reference local files or commands that require a shell are more easily used from clients running directly on a remote workstation.

Complete the following steps to install kubectl and helm on a remote system.

The following procedure shows how to configure the kubectl and helm clients directly on remote host, for an admin user with cluster-admin cluster role. If using a non-admin user such as one with only role privileges within a private namespace, the procedure is the same, however, additional configuration is required in order to use helm.

Prerequisites

You must configure the oidc-auth-apps OIDC Identity Provider (dex) on the target StarlingX environment to get Kubernetes authentication tokens. See Set up OIDC Auth Applications for more information.

Procedure

On the controller, create a rolebinding for the admin-user user. Alternatively, to use group rolebinding and user group membership for authorization, see Configure Users, Groups, and Authorization for more information.

% MYUSER="admin-user"
% cat <<EOF > admin-user-rolebinding.yaml
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
 name: ${MYUSER}-rolebinding
roleRef:
 apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
 kind: ClusterRole
 name: cluster-admin
subjects:
- apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: User
  name: ${MYUSER}
EOF
% kubectl apply -f admin-user-rolebinding.yaml

On the remote workstation, install the kubectl client, set up the Kubernetes configuration and get a token. Follow the steps of section Kubernetes Remote Client Access using the Host Directly at Configure Kubernetes Client Access, then test the kubectl access with the command below.

% kubectl get nodes -o wide
NAME           STATUS   ROLES    AGE    VERSION   INTERNAL-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE ...
controller-0   Ready    master   15h    v1.12.3   192.168.204.3     <none>        CentOS L ...
controller-1   Ready    master   129m   v1.12.3   192.168.204.4     <none>        CentOS L ...
worker-0       Ready    <none>   99m    v1.12.3   192.168.204.201   <none>        CentOS L ...
worker-1       Ready    <none>   99m    v1.12.3   192.168.204.202   <none>        CentOS L ...
%

On the workstation, install the helm client on an Ubuntu host by taking the following actions on the remote Ubuntu system.

Install helm. See the following reference: https://helm.sh/docs/intro/install/. Helm accesses the Kubernetes cluster as configured in the previous step, using the default ~/.kube/config.
```
% wget https://get.helm.sh/helm-v3.2.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz
% tar xvf helm-v3.2.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz
% sudo cp linux-amd64/helm /usr/local/bin
```

Verify that helm installed correctly.

% helm version
version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.2.1", GitCommit:"fe51cd1e31e6a202cba7dead9552a6d418ded79a", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.13.10"}

Run the following commands:

% helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
% helm repo update
% helm repo list
% helm search repo
% helm install wordpress bitnami/wordpress