Kubernetes Dashboard Podman Desktop Extension

Kubernetes Dashboard is an open source extension for Podman Desktop to monitor Kubernetes clusters.

The Kubernetes Dashboard detects your Kubeconfig file, and connects to the current Kubernetes context. Any change of Kubernetes context (either from Podman Desktop or by editing the Kubeconfig file with another tool) is detected by the dashboard, which disconnects from the previous current context and connects to the new one.

Resources

A Dashboard page provides a synthetic view of the main resources present in the Kubernetes context:

• non-namespaced resources: nodes and namespaces,
• namespaced resources: workloads (deployments, pods, jobs, cronjobs), services (services, ingresses, routes) and configuration and storage (persistent volume claims, configmaps, secrets).

You can access from the dashboard, or from the menu, the list of resources of a specific kind (for example, the list of Pods).

From this list, you have access to the details for a specific resource, including:

• a summary of the resource (extracted from the metadata, spec and status of the resource),
• a raw JSON representation of the resource,
• a utility to patch the resource definition, using strategic merge patch.

For Pods, you also have access to:

• the logs of the containers running in the pod,
• a terminal on each container running in the pod.

You can switch the namespace you want to explore from the Dashboard page or from any list of namespaced resources. The extension will disconnect from the previous namespace and connect to the new one.

Port forwardings

From the Summary page of Deployments, Pods and Services, you can create port forwardings on exposed ports.

A dedicated page lists the existing port forwardings, from which you can visit each port forward in your browser, and manage them (delete).

Permissions

The Kubernetes Dashboard checks Read permissions on each resource, and indicates in the Dashboard and in the pages listing the resources if the current user does not have read access on a resource.

Annotations

The user interface supports configuration using annotations on resources. The following annotations are supported:

On Pods

• kubernetes-dashboard.podman-desktop.io/logs-colors: "log level colors"
  Colorize logs levels (by default)
• kubernetes-dashboard.podman-desktop.io/logs-colors: "no colors"
  Disable colorization of logs
• kubernetes-dashboard.podman-desktop.io/logs-timestamps: "true"
  Prefix the logs of the pod's containers with timestamps.
• kubernetes-dashboard.podman-desktop.io/logs-tail-lines: "10"
  Fetch the last n lines of the logs only.
• kubernetes-dashboard.podman-desktop.io/logs-since-seconds: "60"
  Fetch the logs emitted since n seconds only.

Compatibility

The Kubernetes Dashboard extension is compatible with Podman Desktop v1.26.0 and later. The Kubernetes Dashboard internal to Podman Desktop is deactivated when this extension is installed and active.

Installation

Install latest release

Install the custom extension ghcr.io/podman-desktop/podman-desktop-extension-kubernetes-dashboard:latest to try the latest extension.

Development version

Install the custom extension ghcr.io/podman-desktop/podman-desktop-extension-kubernetes-dashboard:next to try the extension published after each commit.

Contributing

First clone this repository on your disk, then run pnpm i in the root directory of the sources, then watch the changes in the packages/webview directory:

$ git clone git@github.com:podman-desktop/extension-kubernetes-dashboard.git
$ cd extension-kubernetes-dashboard
$ pnpm i
[...]
$ cd packages/webview
$ pnpm watch
[ do not stop this command, as it waiting for changes to rebuild the webview ]

Using the production version of Podman Desktop

• In Settings > Preferences, in the Extensions section, enable the Development mode
• In Extensions > Local Extensions, select Add a local folder extension... and select the sub-directory packages/extension of the sources you cloned previously.

You can now make changes to the sources. The project is composed of two parts, which are built separately: the extension code, and the webview code. The extension code is rebuilt after each change by Podman Desktop itself, and the webview part is rebuilt by the pnpm watch command you started previously.

Note that when you only change code in the webview part, the webview is built, and the result is included in the extension, which triggers the rebuild of the extension.

After each change, you may have to restart the extension from the Extensions > Local Extensions page.

Running e2e tests

On the CI

When creating a PR on the GitHub repository, the e2e tests are not executed by default. To run the e2e tests, you need to add the area/ci/e2e label to the PR.

On Linux

Pre-requisites:

• Install setup-envtest (see https://pkg.go.dev/sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/tools/setup-envtest#section-readme)

go install sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/tools/setup-envtest@release-0.22

• install envtest-start:

go install github.com/feloy/envtest-start@latest

To run the tests

• Install a testing binary from https://github.com/podman-desktop/testing-prereleases
• export the variable PODMAN_DESKTOP_BINARY with the path of the podman-desktop testing binary
• execute export KUBEBUILDER_ASSETS=$(setup-envtest use -p path)
• run envtest-start &
• copy the file /tmp/envtest-kubeconfig created by the previous command to the directory tests/resources/
• run pnpm test:e2e. During the tests, the window may be hidden, you can open it using the Tray icon
• once the extension is installed during the first test run, you can run EXTENSION_PREINSTALLED=true pnpm test:e2e