Today at work I had to examine a large kubernetes Ingress definition. The output filled my terminal and as I was not able to quickly scan the text for what I was looking for, I felt slightly annoyed. I searched online for solutions and I found this issue which describes what I want as a feature request.
Some people had posted various solutions in the comments, but for some reason I wanted to try my own. And here it is:
# In your shell resource file
function hl () {
highlight - -S yaml -O truecolor | less
}
See that cheeky call to less there at the end? That’s because I wanted
to navigate through the output at my leisure. Though it’s true that I use
tmux, which supports all kinds of scrollback, I really like the search
feature of less and the amount of control I get.
To invoke it I would simply do
$ kubectl get cm test -oyaml | hl
That’s good enough… for about an day. Which is how long I’ve had it for. Don’t get me wrong, it works wonders, and I love it. I just don’t want to pipe it manually every time.
When I went home I thought about the pull request and how easy it would be
to patch the kubectl executable to somehow include - or fork - the
highlight process to style the output. Before even realizing how stupid
this implementation would be, the nebulous beauty of alias danced before
my eyes. Of course, I didn’t need to touch kubectl at all - I just wanted
to format the output!
So the project kubectl-prettifier-script was born, which aims
to do just that. At most as a temporary solution, until the Kubernetes team
implements the same feature natively.