Bassam Ismail

Importing EKS cluster kubeconfig using AWS CLI

To fetch the kubeconfig of your AWS EKS cluster you need the two things:

1. aws-cli installed on your machine
2. AWS credentials configured

I have a global venv which I activate from my home directory.

$ . ~/.venv/bin/activate.fish
$ pip install awscli

In case my ~/.aws/credentials file isn’t populated I’ll export the environment variables.

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=YOUR_KEY
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=YOUR_SECRET

Once I have these two things in set up, I’d use aws eks subcommand to import the kubeconfig.

$ aws eks update-kubeconfig --region [CLUSTER_REGION] --name [CLUSTER_NAME]
Updated context arn:aws:eks:eu-west-2:ARN:cluster/mothership in ~/.kube/config

With this, the kubeconfig should be updated in our home directory ~/.kube/config and we should be able to query our cluster.

$ kubectl get pods -n kube-system