Recover management cluster credentials when ~/.kube/config is deleted

Products

• VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

Issue/Introduction

This article explains how to recover management cluster credentials when ~/.kube/config is deleted.

Most TKG CLI commands fail if the particular kubeconfig file does not exist or is invalid. In the event that the kubeconfig (~/.kube/config) file has been deleted or corrupted, then the following instructions will help in recovering from that problem.

Environment

Product Version: 1.0

Resolution

1. ssh into the master VM and become root (sudo -i), then run the following command as root (replace <Management Cluster Name>) to get the secret data of the original admin's kubeconfig. Copy the output. Now log out of the master VM.

$ kubectl --kubeconfig /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf get secret <Management Cluster Name>-kubeconfig -n tkg-system -o jsonpath='{.data.value}'

2. Paste the output from the command above into a file on your computer (e.g., secret-kubeconfig-data.dat)

3. Decode the data using base64 command and save it to the default kubeconfig file.

$ cat secret-kubeconfig-data.dat | base64 -D > ~/.kube/config

4. Finally, set the TKG context using the TKG CLI.

$ tkg set management-cluster <mgmt cluster name>

To get access to the clusters back, just run the following on each cluster:

$ tkg get credentials <cluster name>