---
title: "Life pro tip: put your active kubernetes context in your prompt"
desc: "kube_ps1 is love, kube_ps1 is life"
date: 2025-04-05
hero:
  ai: "Photo by Xe Iaso, Canon EOS R6 Mark ii, 16mm wide angle lens"
  file: touch-grass
  prompt: "A color-graded photo of a forest in Gatineau Park, the wildlife looks green and lush"
---

Today I did an oopsie. I tried to upgrade a service in my homelab cluster (`alrest`) but accidentally upgraded it in the production cluster (`aeacus`). I was upgrading `ingress-nginx` to patch [the security vulnerabilities released a while ago](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/03/24/ingress-nginx-cve-2025-1974/). I should have done it sooner, but [things have been rather wild lately](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/) and now [kernel.org runs some software I made](https://social.kernel.org/notice/Asir7LiPevX6XcEVJQ).

<Conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
  <Picture
    path="notes/2025/kube-ps1/domino-meme"
    desc="A domino effect starting at 'Amazon takes out my git server' ending in 'software running on kernel.org'."
  />
</Conv>

Either way, I found out that [Oh my ZSH](https://ohmyz.sh/) (the ZSH prompt toolkit I use) has a plugin for [kube_ps1](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/blob/master/plugins/kube-ps1/README.md). This lets you put your active Kubernetes context in your prompt so that you're less likely to apply the wrong manifest to the wrong cluster.

To install it, I changed the `plugins` list in my `~/.zshrc`:

```diff
-plugins=(git)
+plugins=(git kube-ps1)
```

And then added configuration at the end for kube_ps1:

```sh
export KUBE_PS1_NS_ENABLE=false
export KUBE_PS1_SUFFIX=") "

PROMPT='$(kube_ps1)'$PROMPT
```

This makes my prompt look like this:

```text
(⎈|alrest) ➜  site git:(main) ✗
```

Showing that I'm using the Kubernetes cluster Alrest.

<ConvP>
  <Conv name="Aoi" mood="wut">
    Wouldn't it be better to modify your configuration such that you always have
    to pass a `--context` flag or something?
  </Conv>
  <Conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
    Yes, but some of the tools I use don't have that support universally. Until
    I can ensure they all do, I'm willing to settle for tamper-evident instead
    of tamper-resistant.
  </Conv>
</ConvP>

## Why upgrading ingress-nginx broke my HTTP ingress setup

Apparently when I set up the Kubernetes cluster for my website, the [Anubis docs](https://anubis.techaro.lol) and other things like my Headscale server, I did a very creative life decision. I started out with the "baremetal" self-hosted ingress-nginx install flow and then manually edited the `Service` to be a `LoadBalancer` service instead of a `NodePort` service.

I had forgotten about this. So when the upgrade hit the wrong cluster, Kubernetes happily made that `Service` into a `NodePort` service, destroying the cloud's load balancer that had been doing all of my HTTP ingress.

Thankfully, Kubernetes dutifully recorded logs of that entire process, which I have reproduced here for your amusement.

| Event type | Reason               | Age | From               | Message                  |
| :--------- | :------------------- | :-- | :----------------- | :----------------------- |
| Normal     | Type changed         | 13m | service-controller | LoadBalancer -> NodePort |
| Normal     | DeletingLoadBalancer | 13m | service-controller | Deleting load balancer   |
| Normal     | DeletedLoadBalancer  | 13m | service-controller | Deleted load balancer    |

<ConvP>
  <Conv name="Cadey" mood="facepalm">
    OOPS!
  </Conv>
  <Conv name="Numa" mood="smug">
    Pro tip if you're ever having trouble waking up, take down production.
    That'll wake you up in [a
    jiffy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiffy_(time))!
  </Conv>
</ConvP>

Thankfully, getting this all back up was easy. All I needed to do was change the `Service` type back to LoadBalancer, wait a second for the cloud to converge, and then change the default DNS target from the old IP address to the new one. [external-dns](https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/external-dns/latest/) updated everything once I changed the IP it was told to use, and now everything should be back to normal.

Well, at least I know how to do that now!