I have installed a K8S cluster on laptop using Kubeadm and VirtualBox. It seems a bit odd that the cluster has to be up and running to see the documentation as shown below.
praveensripati@praveen-ubuntu:~$ kubectl explain pods
Unable to connect to the server: dial tcp 192.168.0.31:6443: connect: no route to hostAny workaround for this?
See "kubectl explain — #HeptioProTip"
Behind the scenes,
kubectljust made an API request to my Kubernetes cluster, grabbed the current Swagger documentation of the API version running in the cluster, and output the documentation and object types.
Try kubectl help as an offline alternative, but that won't be as complete (limite to kubectl itself).
So the rather sobering news is that AFAIK there's not out-of-the box way how to do it, though you could totally write a kubectl plugin (it has become rather trivial now in 1.12). But for now, the best I can offer is the following:
# figure out which endpoint kubectl uses to retrieve docs:
$ kubectl -v9 explain pods
# from above I learn that in my case it's apparently
# https://192.168.64.11:8443/openapi/v2 so let's curl that:
$ curl -k https://192.168.64.11:8443/openapi/v2 > resources-docs.jsonFrom here you can, for example, use jq to query for the descriptions. It's not as nice as a proper explain, but kinda is a good enough workaround until someone writes an docs offline query kubectl plugin.
The 'explain' documentation lives in the kube-apiserver and its resource definitions. Hence the need to connect to it through kubectl explain to get any docs. This is different from the standard very basic cli help from kubectl where it's in the kubectl Golang code.
So no workaround really other than setting up a dummy Kubernetes cluster and have kubectl point to it. Please note that CRDs help might not be available since they live in the deployed CRDs themselves.