Installing plugins

A plugin in kubectl is just an executable file (it could be a complied Go program or a Bash shell script, among other things) the name of which begins with kubectl-, and to install the plugin you just have to put its executable file in a directory that's in your PATH variable.

The easiest way to find and install plugins is by using Krew (https://krew.sigs.k8s.io/), the Kubernetes plugin manager. Krew is available for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Krew is a Kubernetes plugin, so let's go ahead and install it. For this example, we are going to use macOS:

1. To install Krew on macOS, run the $ brew install krew command as shown in the following screenshot:

   Figure 7.1 – krew install with brew on macOS

2. Next, we need to download the plugin list:

   $ kubectl krew update

3. When we have a locally cached list of all the plugins, let's check for available plugins by running the $ kubectl krew search command as shown in the following screenshot...