Install Kubernetes CLI Tools¶

Installs the four essential Kubernetes command-line tools on any Linux server in a single script run: kubectl, helm, kustomize, and k9s.

Quick Start¶

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ibtisam-iq/silver-stack/main/scripts/installers/install-kubernetes-cli.sh | bash

No sudo required for the script itself. Individual install steps that write to /usr/local/bin use sudo mv internally.

Script¶

This is a standalone script — it does not depend on a running Kubernetes cluster and can be run on any fresh Linux server.

Tools Installed¶

All four tools are installed to /usr/local/bin/ and made executable. Architecture is auto-detected (x86_64 → amd64).

Idempotency¶

Each tool is checked with command -v before installation. If already present, the install step is skipped and the existing version is logged:

[ OK ]    kubectl already installed
[ OK ]    helm already installed

Re-running the script on an already-configured machine is safe.

Installation Steps¶

Step 1 — Preflight¶

Runs the silver-stack preflight check (OS, architecture, connectivity) before any installation begins:

bash <(curl -fsSL .../preflight.sh)

Exits immediately if preflight fails.

Step 2 — kubectl¶

Fetches the latest stable version string from the official Kubernetes release endpoint, then downloads the binary directly:

curl -sLO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/v${KUBECTL_V}/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
chmod +x kubectl
sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

Step 3 — helm¶

Fetches the latest tag from helm/helm releases, then downloads the official tarball from get.helm.sh:

curl -sLO "https://get.helm.sh/helm-v${HELM_TAG}-linux-amd64.tar.gz"
tar -xzf *.tar.gz
sudo mv linux-amd64/helm /usr/local/bin/helm

Step 4 — kustomize¶

Fetches the latest release from kubernetes-sigs/kustomize, downloads the linux_amd64 tarball via the GitHub releases API, extracts it, and moves the binary:

# asset URL resolved from GitHub API
download_and_install "$ASSET_URL" "/usr/local/bin/kustomize"

The internal download_and_install helper handles .tar.gz, .tgz, and .zip archives — finds the first executable binary in the archive and moves it to the target path.

Step 5 — k9s¶

Detects whether an existing k9s binary matches the current architecture (file $(command -v k9s) | grep x86-64). If missing or wrong architecture, downloads the correct k9s_Linux_amd64.tar.gz asset from derailed/k9s releases:

curl -sLO "$ASSET_URL"
tar -xzf k9s*Linux*
sudo mv k9s /usr/local/bin/k9s
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/k9s

Step 6 — Summary¶

Prints a version summary table on completion:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 • kubectl:          1.33.0
 • helm:             3.17.3
 • kustomize:        5.6.0
 • k9s:              0.32.7
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ OK ]    Kubernetes CLI toolchain ready

Post-Install Verification¶

kubectl version --client
helm version --short
kustomize version
k9s version --short

Notes¶