kubectl-curl

Kubectl plugin to run curl commands against kubernetes pods

Motivation

Sending http requests to kubernetes pods is unnecessarily complicated, this plugin makes it easy.

The plugin creates a port forwarding from the local network to the kubernetes pod that was selected to receive the request, then instantiate a curl command by rewriting the URL to connect to the forwarded local port, and passing all curl options that were given on the command line.

Installation

If $GOPATH/bin is in the PATH, the plugin can be installed with:

$ go install github.com/segmentio/kubectl-curl@latest

If it was installed properly, it will be visibile when listing kubectl plugins:

$ kubectl plugin list
The following compatible plugins are available:

/.../kubectl-curl

Usage

kubectl curl [options] URL [container]

• In the URL, the host part must be the name of the pod to send the request to.
• If no port number is specified, the request will be sent to a http port.
• If there are multiple containers with a http port, the name of the container to send to the request to must be specified after the URL.

Examples

This section records common use cases for this kubectl plugin.

Collecting profiles of Go programs

$ kubectl curl "http://{pod}/debug/pprof/profile?debug=1&seconds=10" > ./profile
$ go tool pprof -http :6060 ./profile

• Full documentation: net/http/pprof

Retrieving prometheus metrics

$ kubectl curl http://{pod}/metrics
...