How To Install Kubectl on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kubectl on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Kubectl is a command-line client for running commands against Kubernetes clusters. It is capable of deploying applications, managing the clusters, viewing their logs, etc.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Kubectl on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Kubectl on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl

Step 2. Installing Kubectl on Ubuntu 20.04.

Now we download the Google Cloud public signing key on your Ubuntu system:

sudo curl –fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg

Next, add the Kubernetes repository to your system using the command below:

echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list

sudo apt update
sudo apt install kubectl

Once Kubectl has been installed successfully, you can look for its installed version by executing the command shown below:

kubectl version

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Kubectl. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Kubectl on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Kubernetes website.