kubectl install error -The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused - did you specify the right host or port

Question

i am trying to install a kops cluster on AWS and to that as a pre-requisite i installed kubectl as per these instructions provided,

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/#install-kubectl

but when i try to verify the installation, i am getting the below error.

ubuntu@ip-172-31-30-74:~$ kubectl version
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"8", GitVersion:"v1.8.0", GitCommit:"6e937839ac04a38cac63e6a7a306c5d035fe7b0a", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2017-09-28T22:57:57Z", GoVersion:"go1.8.3", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}
The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

i am not sure why! because i had set up cluster with similar way earlier and everything worked fine. Now wanted to set up a new cluster, but kind of stuck in this.

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

This error usually means that your kubectl config is not correct and either it points to the wrong address or credentials are wrong.

If you have successfully created a cluster with kops, you just need to export its connections settings to kubectl config.

kops export --name=<your_cluster_name> --config=~/.kube/config

If you want to use a separate config file for this cluster, you can do it by setting the environment variable:

export KUBECONFIG=~/.kube/you_cluster_name.config
kops export kubecfg --name you_cluster_name --config=~$KUBECONFIG

You can also create a kubectl config for each team member using KOPS_STATE_STORE:

export KOPS_STATE_STORE=s3://<somes3bucket>
# NAME=<kubernetes.mydomain.com>
kops export kubecfg ${NAME}