kubectl config-cleanup plugin

kubectl config-cleanup is a plugin for automatically cleaning up your kubeconfig. Every cloud provider has their own utilities for adding kubernetes cluster credentials to your kubeconfig but they don't offer the ability to clean it up once the cluster is deleted. For those of us who launch and delete multiple clusters per day, it would be useful to have an automated way to clean up old kubeconfig entries. This plugin will attempt to connect to each cluster defined in a context, if the connection succeeds then the user, cluster, and context entry are maintained in the result. Otherwise, the entries are removed.

# prints the cleaned kubeconfig to stdout, similar to running: kubectl config view
kubectl config-cleanup

# cleanup and save the result
kubectl config-cleanup --raw > ./kubeconfig-clean.yaml

# cleanup and print the configs that were removed
kubectl config-cleanup --print-removed --raw > ./kubeconfig-removed.yaml

# print only the context names that were removed
kubectl config-cleanup --print-removed -o=jsonpath='{ range.contexts[*] }{ .name }{"\n"}'

DO NOT attempt to overwrite the source kubeconfig, it will result in an empty config. See Known Issues below for details

Install

Install with krew: kubectl krew install config-cleanup

or download the latest release binary for your platform and add it to your $PATH

Roadmap

• Shell autocomplete
• Add users and clusters functionality for config-cleanup.ignore
• implement multi-flag for --ignore-user, --ignore-cluster, --ignore-context

config-cleanup.ignore

Add a ~/.kube/config-cleanup.ignore to specify contexts which should be ignored during cleanup. The associated context, user, and cluster will be maintained in the output. This is useful for long running clusters where the api server is behind a firewall.

example:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
data:
  contexts: |
    prod-cluster
    staging-cluster
    docker-for-desktop

Plugin Development

This project uses the just command runner

Build from source

just build

Release

# dryrun
just dist

# release by pushing a tag
just release $TAG

Known issues

• Error log message when cleaning up GKE clusters that have already been terminated https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/73791

• Attempting to overwrite the source kubeconfig will wipe the config completely.

  • config-cleanup does not support merging kubeconfig files
  • This behavior is consistent with the behavior of kubectl config view --raw > ~/.kube/config

i.e. Dont do this: kubectl config-cleanup --kubeconfig=~/.kube/config --raw > ~/.kube/config

A simple shell script kubectl-config_swap in your path can easily solve for this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
touch ~/.kube/config.swap
mv ~/.kube/config ~/.kube/config.swap.tmp
mv ~/.kube/config.swap ~/.kube/config
mv ~/.kube/config.swap.tmp ~/.kube/config.swap

The workflow would appear as:

kubectl config-cleanup --raw > ~/.kube/config.swap
kubectl config-swap

Running config-swap twice would revert the changes.