I am trying to trigger ksonnet component deployment from within a container on a kubernetes cluster. The ks component prototype is on the node itself. I am just trying to execute ks generate and ks apply command on the node from inside a container on the node.
A container, or a pod do not have access to node resources. They are isolated. You have to run a pod with ksonnet, within the cluster, with kubectl run ...
ksonnet uses Kubernetes' client-go to determine cluster credentials. If this is not working properly, could you please create an issue in ksonnet issues