What’s client-go ?

Where’s client-go ?

  • you can find it in kubernetes/kubernetes/staging directory and published by bot to k8s.io/client-go, kubernetes also uses client-go. it’s interesting if you see client-go from kubernetes vendor, it has symlinks to kubernetes/kubernetes/staging

In this Adventure, very first step is to see how to connect to API Server :)

  • Connecting to API Server
    • There are two ways to talk to cluster using any go program:

      • outside cluster: if your program is standalone and if you have either kubeconfig file or master URL.

      • inside cluster: if your program is supposed to run on kubernetes (for example, controller)

  • When your program runs on kubernetes, it uses service account token inside the pods /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount for auth and tls stuff.

Connecting to cluster using client-go

  • clientcmd holds the required code to configuring connection to the cluster using kubeconfig as well as about modification to kubeconfig. Code reference here.
import "k8s.io/client-go/tools/clientcmd"
  • if you have master URL and kubeconfig both:
config, err := clientcmd.BuildConfigFromFlags(masterURL, kubeconfig)
  • if you have only have kubeconfig file:
config, err := clientcmd.BuildConfigFromFlags("", kubeconfig)
  • If you are running program on kubernetes, you don’t need to provided parameters, it will automatically fetch details using serviceaccount tokens:
config, err := clientcmd.BuildConfigFromFlags("", "")

  • If you don’t provide any parameters, it fallbacks to InClusterConfig, even if it fails, it fallbacks to default configs which is either KUBERNETES_MASTER environment variable or simply http://localhost:8080, code reference here.

  • Directly use this (even above way internally uses this), Code Ref here.

import "k8s.io/client-go/rest"
...
config,err := rest.InClusterConfig()

This method basically gets KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST and KUBERNETES_SERVICE_PORT environment variables (which are injected into every pod) and service token to generate the config.

  • config has all necessary information to talk to the cluster from anywhere :) If you check struct defination here

it has fields like Host, APIPath, Username, Password, BearerToken, etc which are needed to talk to cluster

  • If you explore more, you will see clientcmd/api has Config (Kind: Config) struct which is API resource for kubeconfig, code is here

TGIF, Enough for Today :) Happy Weekend :) Stay Tuned :)