Quickstart

Prerequisites

kubectl
kubectl bind plugin installed

Start with kbind

Quick Development Setup

For a local development environment, follow the kind setup guide. It creates a provider cluster and a consumer cluster, starts the backend and konnector, and adds the Widget API to the catalog. Docker, kind, and Go are required.

After the development environment is ready, you can:

Authenticate to the provider cluster:
```
kubectl bind login http://localhost:8080
```
This opens a browser for authentication and saves the session.
Bind an API service from provider to consumer:
```
kubectl bind catalog
kubectl bind export widgets --kubeconfig=.kbind-quickstart/consumer.kubeconfig \
  --install-konnector=false
```
The development setup already runs the konnector, so skip installing another copy. You can also browse the catalog at http://localhost:8080.

Verify bound resources:

export KUBECONFIG="$PWD/.kbind-quickstart/consumer.kubeconfig"
kubectl get connections,clusterbindings
kubectl wait --for=condition=Established crd/widgets.example.org --timeout=120s

Create an example resource:

kubectl apply -f - <<'EOF'
apiVersion: example.org/v1
kind: Widget
metadata:
  name: my-widget
  namespace: default
spec:
  size: large
EOF

Check the resource synced to the provider:

kubectl --kubeconfig=.kbind-quickstart/provider.kubeconfig -n default \
  wait --for=create widget/my-widget --timeout=120s
kubectl --kubeconfig=.kbind-quickstart/provider.kubeconfig -n default get widgets

For other service APIs, see the integration examples. When finished, follow the development guide's cleanup.

Production Deployment

For an in-cluster deployment, use the Helm charts to install the consumer konnector and optional provider backend.

Once you have a backend running, either locally or in a cluster, you can connect to it:

Connect to kbind Server

kubectl bind login https://my-kube-bind-server.example.com

Open kbind Web UI and bind services

Open your provider's URL in a browser to browse the catalog and bind services. For the same workflow from the CLI, use kubectl bind catalog and kubectl bind export <name>.