Creating a Kubernetes cluster is as simple as:

$ kind create cluster

This will bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster using a pre-built node image - you can find it on docker hub kindest/node. If you desire to build the node image yourself see the building image section. To specify another image use the --image flag.

By default, the cluster will be given the name kind-1. "1," here, is the default context name. Use the --name flag to assign the cluster a different context name.

If you want the create cluster command to block until the control plane reaches a ready status, you can use the --wait flag and specify a timeout. To use --wait you must specify the units of the time to wait. For example, to wait for 30 seconds, do --wait 30s, for 5 minutes do --wait 5m, etc.

Note: If you are running kind on MacOS or Windows then it is recommended that you have at least 4GB of RAM and disk space (these are estimates for a single node kind cluster) dedicated to the virtual machine (VM) running the Docker engine otherwise the Kubernetes cluster might fail to start up.

To change the resource limits for the Docker engine on Mac, you'll need to open the Preferences menu.

Now, go to the Advanced settings page, and change the settings there, see changing Docker's resource limits.

You may also try removing any unused data left by the Docker engine - e.g., docker system prune.

After creating a cluster, you can use kubectl to interact with it by using the configuration file generated by kind:

export KUBECONFIG="$(kind get kubeconfig-path)"
kubectl cluster-info

kind get kubeconfig-path returns the location of the generated confguration file. If you gave a non-default cluster context name to your cluster, then you can specify the name by using the --name flag.

To see all the clusters you have created, you can use the get clusters command.

For example, let's say you create two clusters:

$ kind create cluster # Default cluster context name is "1".
...
$ kind create cluster --name 2

When you list your kind clusters, you will see something like the following:

$ kind get clusters
2
1

Both of these clusters will have a kubeconfig file to go along with them:

$ kind get kubeconfig-path
/home/user/.kube/kind-config-1

$ kind get kubeconfig-path --name 2
/home/user/.kube/kind-config-2

If you created a cluster with kind create cluster then deleting is equally simple:

$ kind delete cluster

If the flag --name is not specified, kind will use the default cluster context name "1" and delete that cluster. Recall that cluster context names are prefixed with kind- so the default cluster name is kind-1.

kind runs a local Kubernetes cluster by using Docker containers as "nodes". kind uses the node-image to run Kubernetes artifacts, such as kubeadm or kubelet. The node-image in turn is built off the base-image, which installs all the dependencies needed for Docker and Kubernetes to run in a container.

See building the base image for more advanced information.

Currently, kind supports three different ways to build a node-image: via apt, or if you have the Kubernetes source in your host machine ($GOPATH/src/k8s.io/kubernetes), by using docker or bazel. To specify the build type use the flag --type. kind will default to using the build type docker if none is specified.

$ kind build node-image --type apt

Similarly as for the base-image command, you can specify the name and tag of the resulting node image using the flag --image.

If you previously changed the name and tag of the base image, you can use here the flag --base-image to specify the name and tag you used.

To build the base-image we use the build command:

$ kind build base-image

If you want to specify the path to the base image source files you can use the --source flag. If --source is not specified, kind has enbedded the contents of the in default base image in pkg/build/base/sources and will use this to build it.

By default, the base image will be tagged as kindest/base:latest. If you want to change this, you can use the --image flag.

$ kind build base-image --image base:v0.1.0

When creating your kind cluster, via create cluster, you can use a configuration file to run specific commands before or after systemd or kubeadm run. To specify a configuration file when creating a cluster, use the --config flag. For a sample kind configuration file see kind-example-config.

kind has the ability to export all kind related logs for you to explore. To export all logs from the default cluster (context name "1"):

$ kind export logs
Exported logs to: /tmp/396758314

Like all other commands, if you want to perform the action on a cluster with a different context name use the --name flag.

As you can see, kind placed all the logs for the cluster kind-1 in a temporary directory. If you want to specify a location then simply add the path to the directory after the command:

$ kind export logs ./somedir  
Exported logs to: ./somedir

The structure of the logs will look more or less like this:

.
├── docker-info.txt
└── kind-1-control-plane/
    ├── containers
    ├── docker.log
    ├── inspect.json
    ├── journal.log
    ├── kubelet.log
    ├── kubernetes-version.txt
    └── pods/

The logs contain information about the Docker host, the containers running kind, the Kubernetes cluster itself, etc.