Quickstart¶

This page takes you from a fresh install to browsing, inspecting and acting on a real cluster — in about five minutes.

No cluster handy?

Spin up two throwaway kind clusters with sample workloads (a Helm release, some intentionally broken pods, metrics) using the bundled script — see Test clusters. They're perfect for following along.

1. Launch Kubus¶

Open the desktop app, or start it from source:

pnpm start

Kubus opens in a window (or your browser) showing the Overview page. On first launch no clusters are selected yet — that's the next step.

2. Select your clusters¶

Click the cluster switcher in the top bar and tick one or more kubeconfig contexts. Kubus reads the same contexts kubectl config get-contexts shows you.

Selecting kubeconfig contexts in the cluster switcher — Pick any number of contexts — lists merge across all of them.

The moment you select clusters, the Overview dashboard fills in: node counts, pod health, failing workloads and recent warnings, per cluster.

3. Browse a resource¶

Open the left nav and pick a kind — say Workloads → Pods. You get a live list that updates over a WebSocket watch; no refresh button needed. If you selected more than one cluster, a Cluster column tells you where each row lives.

The Pods list with live status — Every kind — including your CRDs — with sortable, filterable columns.

Use the namespace filter in the top bar to narrow things down.

4. Inspect something¶

Click a pod's name. A details drawer slides in with:

an Overview tab — status, containers, images, env, volumes, related objects;
a YAML tab — a full Monaco editor you can read or edit;
Events, a relationship Map, and (for pods) live Metrics.

The resource details drawer — A human-friendly overview, plus the raw YAML when you need it.

5. Do something¶

From any row's ⋮ menu (or the details drawer, or the command palette) you can act:

Logs — stream them, even aggregated across a Deployment's pods
Shell — open a terminal straight into a container
Scale, Rollout restart, Roll back
Port forward, Copy files, Delete

Try Logs on the podinfo deployment, or Shell into one of its pods.

6. Drive it from the keyboard¶

Press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on macOS) to open the command palette. Type to search across resources, kinds and pages; press Tab on a result to run an action on it; or type > to run app commands like Toggle dark / light mode.

Where to next¶

User guide

A feature-by-feature tour of everything Kubus can do.

Read the guide
Security model

Exactly how Kubus keeps things local and what the production guard does.

Security