kubectl-revisions

🚀 Time-travel through your workload revision history 🕰️

About

kubectl-revisions is a kubectl plugin and can be invoked as kubectl revisions, or for short k revisions.

The revisions plugin allows you to go back in time in the history of revisions and answers common questions like "Why was my Deployment rolled?"

It gives more output than kubectl rollout history and is easier to use than kubectl get replicaset or kubectl get controllerrevision.

Installation

Using krew (recommended):

kubectl krew install revisions

Using go:

go install github.com/timebertt/kubectl-revisions@latest

Set up shell completion (docs):

kubectl revisions completion -h

Usage

Also see the reference docs.

k revisions get / k revisions list

Get the revision history of a workload resource (Deployment, StatefulSet, or DaemonSet).

The history is based on the ReplicaSets/ControllerRevisions still in the system. I.e., the history is limited by the configured revisionHistoryLimit.

By default, all revisions are printed as a list. If the --revision flag is given, the selected revision is printed instead. This is similar to using k get replicaset or k get controllerrevision, but allows easy selection of the relevant objects and returns a sorted list. This is also similar to k rollout history, but doesn't only print revision numbers.

k revisions diff / k revisions why

Compare multiple revisions of a workload resource (Deployment, StatefulSet, or DaemonSet). A.k.a., "Why was my Deployment rolled?"

The history is based on the ReplicaSets/ControllerRevisions still in the system. I.e., the history is limited by the configured revisionHistoryLimit.

By default, the latest two revisions are compared. The --revision flag allows selecting the revisions to compare.

The k revisions diff command uses diff -u -N to compare revisions by default. It also respects the KUBECTL_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable like the kubectl diff command. To get a nicer diff output, you can use one of these:

# Use a colored external diff program
export KUBECTL_EXTERNAL_DIFF="colordiff -u"
# Use dyff as a rich diff program
export KUBECTL_EXTERNAL_DIFF="dyff between --omit-header"
# Show diff in VS Code
export KUBECTL_EXTERNAL_DIFF="code --diff --wait"

For example: