I have an OpenShift server I'm trying to work on. When I use:

oc apply -f

My request is successfully processed.

However, many tools I want to use for development expect kubectl to be used to connect to the cluster. In most circumstances, I can use kubectl with no problems.

However, in the case of kubectl apply -f, this fails with error:

Error from server (Forbidden): unknown

While running oc apply -f works as expected.

To try to bypass this, I created (on Windows) a symbolic link named "kubectl" to the oc executable. Unexpectedly, this caused the oc command to start behaving like the kubectl command, and again receiving the same error.

Calling the full path to the link, as well as simply renaming "oc.exe" to "kubectl.exe" produces the same error. I confirmed I was indeed calling the correct bianry by running kubectl version, and I received different results from the vanilla binary vs. the openshift wrapper.

Enabling verbose logging: kubectl apply -f service.yaml --v 6 gives this output

I0625 13:09:43.873985   11744 loader.go:357] Config loaded from file C:\Users\username/.kube/config
I0625 13:09:44.175973   11744 round_trippers.go:436] GET https://myhost:443/swagger-2.0.0.pb-v1 403 Forbidden in 286 milliseconds
I0625 13:09:44.179974   11744 helpers.go:201] server response object: [{
  "metadata": {},
  "status": "Failure",
  "message": "unknown",
  "reason": "Forbidden",
  "details": {
    "causes": [
      {
        "reason": "UnexpectedServerResponse",
        "message": "unknown"
      }
    ]
  },
  "code": 403
}]

Running using oc apply -f service.yaml --v 6 gives almost the same result, except that after the initial 403 error, I get the following output:

I0625 13:37:19.403259    7228 round_trippers.go:436] GET https://myhost:443/api 200 OK in 5 milliseconds

And the command continues on to work correctly.

Is there anyway I can bypass this odd behavior, and somehow use kubectl to successfully run kubectl apply -f against the OpenShift server?

Edit:

The oc binary wrapper uses kubectl 1.9.
The vanilla kubectl command uses 1.10.
The server is kubectl 1.6 and openshift 3.6.