Kui: CLI-driven Graphics for Kubernetes

We love CLIs, and think they are critical for interacting in a flexible way with the cloud. We need the power to go off the rails. But ASCII is tedious. Kui takes your normal kubectl command line requests and responds with graphics. Instead of ASCII tables, you are presented with sortable ones. Instead of copying and pasting long auto-generated resource names to drill down, in Kui you just click. Download Now!

Watch and apply requests present you with live tables. Instead of poring over complex YAML, you can browse the facets of your resources in a tabbed UI. Drill down, drill up, and view logs or the events related just to the resource of interest, again with Kui you can just click.

Iterating through a table to find the needle in the haystack? With Kui, you can click the rows in rapid succession, and Kui sends the details to a side terminal; the main table will not scroll out of view. If you are working with jobs, you can see a "waterfall" diagram by simply executing k get jobs.

In summary: Kui enhances your CLI experience, but is also fast. It launches in 1-2 seconds, and can process standard kubectl commands 2-3 times faster than kubectl itself.

Next steps

• Download a prebuilt binary
• Enhance Kui
• Build your own custom-branded Kui client

Installation

Kui-MacOS.tar.bz2 | Kui-Linux-x64.zip | Kui-Linux-arm64.zip | Kui-Win32-x64.zip

You may launch Kui in two ways:

• Open the Kui app, either by double clicking on the executable, or by launching the executable from your terminal, e.g. open /path/to/Kui.app on macOS.
• As a kubectl plugin, via the kubectl-kui script that is bundled with the prebuilt images. Make sure the directory enclosing the script is on your PATH; e.g. for macOS:

curl -L https://macos-tarball.kui-shell.org/ | tar jxf -
export PATH=$PWD/Kui-darwin-x64/Kui.app/Contents/Resources:$PATH
kubectl kui get pods

After the final command, you should see a popup window listing pods in your current namespace.

Windows Warnings: Kui currently has some bugs in its treatment of backslashes in filepaths. Please use forward slashes for now. Thanks!

Rolling Your Own

Don't trust the prebuilt binaries? We hear you. Roll your own Kui.

Contributing

Kui uses Electron, which allows for distributing clients either as a local platform application, or as a hosted browser-based client. If you want to help, please take a look at the developer guide and our guidelines.

Code of Conduct

Participation in the Kubernetes community is governed by the Kubernetes Code of Conduct.