Commands & Arguments

This page lists the most common kOps commands. Please refer to the kOps cli reference for full documentation.

kops create

kops create registers a cluster. There are two ways of registering a cluster: using a cluster spec file or using cli arguments.

kops create -f <cluster spec>

kops create -f <cluster spec> will register a cluster using a kOps spec yaml file. After the cluster has been registered you need to run kops update cluster --yes to create the cloud resources.

kops create cluster

kops create cluster <clustername> creates a cloud specification in the registry using cli arguments. In most cases, you will need to edit the cluster spec using kops edit before actually creating the cloud resources. Once confirmed you don’t need any modifications, you can add the --yes flag to immediately create the cluster including cloud resource.

kops update cluster

kops update cluster <clustername> creates or updates the cloud resources to match the cluster spec.

As a precaution, it is safer run in ‘preview’ mode first using kops update cluster --name <name>, and once confirmed the output matches your expectations, you can apply the changes by adding --yes to the command - kops update cluster --name <name> --yes.

kops rolling-update cluster

kops update cluster <clustername> updates a kubernetes cluster to match the cloud and kOps specifications.

As a precaution, it is safer run in ‘preview’ mode first using kops rolling-update cluster --name <name>, and once confirmed the output matches your expectations, you can apply the changes by adding --yes to the command - kops rolling-update cluster --name <name> --yes.

kops get clusters

kops get clusters lists all clusters in the registry.

kops delete cluster

kops delete cluster deletes the cloud resources (instances, DNS entries, volumes, ELBs, VPCs etc) for a particular cluster. It also removes the cluster from the registry.

As a precaution, it is safer run in ‘preview’ mode first using kops delete cluster --name <name>, and once confirmed the output matches your expectations, you can perform the actual deletion by adding --yes to the command - kops delete cluster --name <name> --yes.

kops toolbox template

kops toolbox template lets you generate a kOps spec using go templates. This is very handy if you want to consistently manage multiple clusters.

kops version

kops version will print the version of the code you are running.