kubectl tree

A kubectl plugin to explore ownership relationships between Kubernetes objects through ownersReferences on the objects.

The kubectl lineage plugin is very similar to kubectl tree, but it understands logical relationships between some API objects without needing ownerReferences.

Installation

Use krew plugin manager to install:

kubectl krew install tree
kubectl tree --help

Demo

Example (Deployment):

Example (Knative Service):

Example (Agones Fleet):

Flags

By default, the plugin will only search "namespaced" objects in the same namespace as the specified object.

• -A, --all-namespaces: Search namespaced and non-namespaced objects in all namespaces.

• -l, --selector: Selector (label query) to filter on. Supports equality (=, ==, !=), set-based (in, notin), and existence operators. Examples:

  • -l key1=value1,key2=value2 (equality)
  • -l "env in (prod,staging)" (set-based)
  • -l "tier=frontend,env!=test" (mixed)

  This helps reduce workload and data volume when working with large clusters.

• --condition-types: Comma-separated list of condition types to check (default: Ready). Example: Ready,Processed,Scheduled.

Author

Ahmet Alp Balkan @ahmetb.

Special acknowledgement: This tool is heavily inspired by @nimakaviani's knative-inspect as it's a generalized version of it.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.

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This is not an official Google project.