Minikube kubectl autocompletion not working

[itay-grudev]

What Happened?

As the documentation specified I tried using the kubectl provided in the project using:

sudo ln -s $(which minikube) /usr/local/bin/kubectl

I am on Ubuntu 22.04 and I tried both bash and zsh. In both cases the autocompletion doesn't work. I tried multiple things, sourcing the auto completion manually and putting them in the configuration file for each respective shell:

source <(kubectl completion zsh)
source <(kubectl completion bash)

I tried using the oh-my-zsh plugin. Nothing - it just doesn't work.

After installing a dedicated kubectl package via snapd everything works fine. There is just something wrong with the minikube setup.

Attach the log file

Not applicable.

Operating System

Ubuntu

Driver

Docker

[hypeitnow]

I can confirm

[RA489]

/kind support

[fede843]

same here

[moto-ctrl]

I have just spent half day trying to make it to work and failed. I'm on Debian 11 Bullseye with bash.
minikube completion works perfectly fine, built-in kubectl I cannot configure to do completion. tried both with link and with alias, user command, bashrc and system-wide file drop.
minikube version: v1.29.0

[moto-ctrl]

It appears to have been reported before but never fixed
#12938
There's short code someone created to point bash directly to minikube cached version of kubectl that will do completions, but it's still a workaround as far as I can see - and not very pretty one especially 'improved' version with in-line perl

[ben-krieger]

Using export BASH_COMP_DEBUG_FILE=$HOME/kubectl.completion and then attempting to complete kubectl ge, I see these logs:

========= starting completion logic ==========
cur is ge, words[*] is kubectl ge, #words[@] is 2, cword is 1
Truncated words[*]: kubectl ge,
lastParam ge, lastChar e
Calling kubectl __complete ge
The completion directive is: 0
The completions are: 
__kubectl_handle_completion_types: COMP_TYPE is 9

You can see that it's evaluating kubectl __complete ge in a subshell. Trying this myself, I get an error:

$ kubectl __complete ge; echo $?
Error: flags cannot be placed before plugin name: --cluster
1

So it appears that since minikube is always adding some flags, the completion script (minikube kubectl completion bash) now cannot be used with minikube kubectl either linked or aliased.

[ben-krieger]

It seems like a pretty simple fix:

diff --git a/cmd/minikube/cmd/kubectl.go b/cmd/minikube/cmd/kubectl.go
index ace509340..26825b1c3 100644
--- a/cmd/minikube/cmd/kubectl.go
+++ b/cmd/minikube/cmd/kubectl.go
@@ -96,7 +96,7 @@ host. Please be aware that when using --ssh all paths will apply to the remote m
                        os.Exit(1)
                }
 
-               if len(args) > 1 && args[0] != "--help" {
+               if len(args) > 1 && args[0] != "--help" && args[0] != "__complete" {
                        cluster := []string{"--cluster", cname}
                        args = append(cluster, args...)

Before:

$ go run ./cmd/minikube kubectl __complete ge
Error: flags cannot be placed before plugin name: --cluster
exit status 1

After:

$ go run ./cmd/minikube kubectl __complete ge
get	Display one or many resources
:4
Completion ended with directive: ShellCompDirectiveNoFileComp

I'll submit a PR.

[moto-ctrl]

great job @ben-krieger - I can see you got your PR merged! Thank you, looking forward to the new release to test it!