Getting started

June 15, 2026 · View on GitHub

Klustr is a pure client: it installs nothing in your cluster and uses the same ~/.kube/config your kubectl already reads. Launch the app, point it at a context, and you see a live view of everything that context has permission to see.

Connecting to a context

  1. On launch, Klustr reads ~/.kube/config and lists every context it finds on the Connections screen.
  2. Click a context to connect. You land on the resource browser with the sidebar on the left.
  3. The header's Disconnect button drops you back to the Connections screen at any time.

You can pin a context as the default with Auto-connect on its card — Klustr will connect to it directly on the next launch instead of showing the picker.

Connecting starts only the Namespace and Pod informers up front; every other resource kind starts watching the first time you open it. Opening a kind you have no permission to list shows an empty table rather than erroring — Klustr probes your access on connect and simply hides what you can't see.

Selecting namespaces

The namespace selector in the header filters every list view:

  • Leave it empty for all namespaces (the default).
  • Pick one or more namespaces to narrow the view. The selection is remembered per cluster (and per multi-cluster set) across restarts.
  • Press ⌘N to search namespaces quickly, and star the ones you use most so they float to the top.

Switching namespaces only changes what the lists query — it never restarts the underlying watches, so it's instant.

Read-only mode

Each context has a per-context read-only switch. When it's on, every mutating action (apply, delete, scale, restart, Helm install/upgrade, sync, …) is blocked for that context. Use it to browse a production cluster with confidence that no button can change anything.

Finding things fast

  • ⌘P — command palette: fuzzy-search resources by name across the current view.
  • ⌘N — namespace search.
  • ? — keyboard shortcut cheatsheet.

Next steps