Kubernetes Off The Shelf (KOTS) Software

CLI

kots install

The install command is the recommended way to learn kots. Executing the install command will install an application and the kotsadm Admin Console to an existing Kubernetes cluster. This command supports installing Helm charts (without Tiller), standard Kubernetes applications and also Replicated apps.

To try it, just choose a helm chart (Elasticsearch) and run the following command:

kubectl kots install helm://elastic/elasticsearch --repo https://helm.elastic.co --namespace elasticsearch

After this command completes, the kotsadm Admin Console will be running in your cluster, listening on port :8800 on a ClusterIP service in the namespace you deployed the application to. You can connect to this using kubectl port-forward, or set up an ingress/load balancer of your own.

kubectl admin-console --namespace elasticsearch

And now visit http://localhost:8800 to set the Elasticsearch Admin Console.

kots pull

The pull command will create a local directory set up so you can create Kustomize-friendly patches and then use kubectl to deploy to a cluster yourself. The pull command will not add the admin console to a cluster or install anything in your cluster.

kubectl kots pull helm://elastic/elasticsearch --namespace elasticsearch
kubectl apply -k ./elasticsearch/overlays/midstream

kots upload

The upload command will upload a directory with an upstream, base and overlays directory to a kotsdm server.

kubectl kots upload ~/elasticsearch

kots download

The download command will download an application YAML from a kotsadm server. This is especially useful when paired with upload (above) to iterate on and make changes to an application.

kubectl kots download [--namespace] [app-slug]

The app-slug argument is optional. If there is more than 1 application in the specified namespace, kots will prompt for which one to download.