Kubernetes Has a Free API — Here's How to Manage Clusters Programmatically

Kubernetes provides a powerful REST API for managing containers, deployments, services, and more. Every kubectl command is just an API call — and you can use it directly.

API Access

# Start a proxy to the API server
kubectl proxy --port=8001

# List pods
curl http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/default/pods | jq .items[].metadata.name

# Get deployments
curl http://localhost:8001/apis/apps/v1/namespaces/default/deployments

Node.js Client

npm install @kubernetes/client-node

import * as k8s from "@kubernetes/client-node";

const kc = new k8s.KubeConfig();
kc.loadFromDefault();

const k8sApi = kc.makeApiClient(k8s.CoreV1Api);
const appsApi = kc.makeApiClient(k8s.AppsV1Api);

// List pods
const { body } = await k8sApi.listNamespacedPod("default");
body.items.forEach(pod => {
  console.log(`${pod.metadata.name}: ${pod.status.phase}`);
});

Create a Deployment

const deployment = {
  metadata: { name: "my-app" },
  spec: {
    replicas: 3,
    selector: { matchLabels: { app: "my-app" } },
    template: {
      metadata: { labels: { app: "my-app" } },
      spec: {
        containers: [{
          name: "app",
          image: "nginx:latest",
          ports: [{ containerPort: 80 }],
          resources: {
            requests: { cpu: "100m", memory: "128Mi" },
            limits: { cpu: "500m", memory: "256Mi" }
          }
        }]
      }
    }
  }
};

await appsApi.createNamespacedDeployment("default", deployment);
console.log("Deployment created!");

Watch for Changes

const watch = new k8s.Watch(kc);

await watch.watch("/api/v1/namespaces/default/pods", {},
  (type, pod) => {
    console.log(`${type}: ${pod.metadata.name} — ${pod.status.phase}`);
  },
  (err) => console.error(err)
);

Scale Deployment

const scale = { spec: { replicas: 5 } };
await appsApi.patchNamespacedDeploymentScale(
  "my-app", "default", scale,
  undefined, undefined, undefined, undefined,
  { headers: { "Content-Type": "application/merge-patch+json" } }
);

kubectl Essentials

kubectl get pods -o wide
kubectl describe pod my-pod
kubectl logs my-pod --tail=100 -f
kubectl exec -it my-pod -- /bin/sh
kubectl port-forward svc/my-service 8080:80
kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml
kubectl rollout restart deployment/my-app

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