virtuallypotato/content/posts/2022/accessing-tce-cluster-from-new-device/index.md

title	date	description	featured	draft	toc	usePageBundles	codeLineNumbers	series	tags	comment
Accessing a Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes Cluster from a new device	2022-02-01T10:58:57-06:00	The Tanzu Community Edition documentation does a great job of explaining how to authenticate to a newly-deployed cluster at the tail end of the installation steps, but how do you log in from another system?	false	true	false	true	false	Tips	vmware kubernetes tanzu	true

When I recently set up my Tanzu Community Edition environment, I did so from a Linux VM since I knew that my Chromebook Linux environment wouldn't support the kind bootstrap cluster used for the deployment. But now I'd like to be able to connect to the cluster directly using the tanzu and kubectl CLI tools. How do I get the appropriate cluster configuration over to my Chromebook?

The Tanzu CLI actually makes that pretty easy. I just run these commands on my Linux VM to export the kubeconfig of my management (tce-mgmt) and workload (tce-work) clusters to a pair of files:

tanzu management-cluster kubeconfig get --admin --export-file tce-mgmt-kubeconfig.yaml
tanzu cluster kubeconfig get tce-work --admin --export-file tce-work-kubeconfig.yaml

I could then use scp to pull the files from the VM into my local Linux environment. I then needed to install kubectl and the tanzu CLI (making sure to also enable shell auto-completion along the way!), and I could import the configurations locally:

❯ tanzu login --kubeconfig tce-mgmt-kubeconfig.yaml --context tce-mgmt-admin@tce-mgmt --name tce-mgmt
✔  successfully logged in to management cluster using the kubeconfig tce-mgmt

❯ tanzu login --kubeconfig tce-work-kubeconfig.yaml --context tce-work-admin@tce-work --name tce-work
✔  successfully logged in to management cluster using the kubeconfig tce-work