Installation

To run the Kubetail CLI tool (kubetail) inside a container you can use the kubetail-cli docker image. The image is published to Docker Hub and the GitHub Container Registry on every release:

Registry	Image
Docker Hub	kubetail/kubetail-cli
GHCR	ghcr.io/kubetail-org/kubetail-cli

Two variants are available:

Tag suffix	Base image	Description
(none)	scratch	Minimal image, smallest footprint
-alpine	alpine	Includes a shell and standard utilities

Docker Run

To use the CLI tool locally with docker run you need to mount your local .kube/config file into a kubetail-cli container:

docker run --rm -it \
  -v ~/.kube/config:/root/.kube/config:ro \
  kubetail/kubetail-cli logs \
  --kubeconfig /root/.kube/config \
  -f \
  deployments/my-app

You can also use the sh entrypoint to start an interactive session:

docker run --rm -it \
  -v ~/.kube/config:/root/.kube/config:ro \
  --entrypoint sh \
  kubetail/kubetail-cli

Docker Compose

To use the CLI tool locally with docker-compose you can use this docker-compose.yml config file to get started:

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubetail-org/kubetail/refs/heads/main/config/examples/docker-compose.yml
docker-compose up

This will mount your local .kube/config file into a kubetail-cli container and start the dashboard server at http://localhost:7500.

Kubernetes Pod

To use the CLI tool inside a cluster you can use this kubetail-cli-pod.yaml manifest file to get started:

kubectl add -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubetail-org/kubetail/refs/heads/main/config/examples/kubetail-cli-pod.yaml

This will start a kubetail-cli container inside the default namespace with access to pod logs in the same namespace. Once the pod is running you can exec into it and run CLI commands using the --in-cluster flag:

kubectl exec -it kubetail-cli -- sh
# ./kubetail logs --in-cluster -f deployments/my-app