Summary

This is a walkthrough to setup Visual Studio Code (VSCode) to manage an external Kubernetes cluster. In this example, VSCode will be connected to a Kubernetes Cluster running on Raspberry Pi. The VSCode extension provides visual object navigation of the cluster and terminal execution of kubectl to modify cluster objects.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster (v1.18.3 used in this example)
• Visual Studio Code

Description

The following steps will reference a Linux Kubernetes cluster as the source system and a Windows environment as the target system. For these steps there is an assumption that the Kubernetes configuration file (kubeconfig) has been added to the user profile of the master node on the Linux cluster.

pirate – is the Linux user profile (based on the Hypriot distribution)
192.168.0.20 / k8spiblue – is the Linux master node IP / hostname
192.168.0.21 / k8spiblack – is a Linux worker node IP / hostname
192.168.0.22 / k8spiyellow – is a Linux worker node IP / hostname
torben – is the Windows user profile

Steps

From the Windows target system, copy the Kubernetes configuration file (kubeconfig) from the Linux user profile to the Windows user profile.

C:\Users\Torben>scp pirate@192.168.0.20:/home/pirate/.kube/config ./.kube/config

Enter a password for the user (pirate) when prompted and perform a directory listing for verification

Launch VSCode, click Extensions on the Activity bar and search the Marketplace for ‘Kubernetes’.
Click ‘Install’ and install any dependencies if required, such as Kubectl and Helm.

When installation is complete, select ‘Kubernetes’ from the Activity bar to open.

In the Kubernetes side bar, hover over Clusters and click the ellipses ‘…’ to select ‘Set kubeconfig’.
Select ‘+ Add new kubeconfig’ and navigate to the config file copied previously (%USERPROFILE%\.kube\config).
The Clusters node should now be connected to the remote cluster and the nodes can be expanded to show the cluster hosts.

Expand a node to see the pods.

In the Terminal window, execute kubectl get nodes to get listing of the cluster nodes

Select Explorer extension on the Activity pane and we can now edit object files and apply them with kubectl directly from Windows.