Skip to content

Development Environment using kind

All the instructions assume you have already cloned the kube-bind repository and have Go installed.

This guide will walk you through setting up kube-bind between two Kubernetes clusters, where

  • Provider cluster:
    • Deploys kube-bind backend
    • Provides kube-bind compatible backend for MangoDB resources
  • Consumer cluster:
    • Provides an application consuming MangoDBs from the provider cluster

This guide works best on Linux. macOS and Windows users may need to adjust some commands accordingly.

Pre-requisites

To start, you'll need the following tools available in your system:

To install kubectl-bind plugin, please download the archive for your platform from the link above, extract it, and place the kubectl-bind executable in your system's $PATH.

Note

Tip: In case of encountering Too many open files error when deploying the Kind clusters, run following commands:

sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances=512

See the kind documentation for more details.

Setup

Run kubectl bind dev create, which will automatically create two Kind clusters (provider and consumer), deploy kube-bind backend in the provider cluster, and print required commands to bind the consumer cluster to the provider.

This command will create two Kind clusters named kind-provider and kind-consumer, set up a Docker network for them to communicate, and install kube-bind backend in the provider cluster and establish right hostAlias entries for communication between clusters.

kubectl bind dev create

You should see output similar to this:

kubectl bind dev create
🧪 EXPERIMENTAL: kube-bind dev command is in preview
📦 Requirements: Docker must be installed and running
Warning: Could not automatically add host entry. Please run:
echo '127.0.0.1 kube-bind.dev.local' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
Kind cluster kind-provider already exists, skipping creation
Wrote kubeconfig kind-provider.kubeconfig
Helm chart installed successfully
Provider cluster IP address: 192.168.155.2
Creating kind cluster kind-consumer with network kube-bind-dev
Kind cluster kind-consumer created
Wrote kubeconfig kind-consumer.kubeconfig
🚀 kube-bind dev environment is ready!

- Provider cluster kubeconfig: kind-provider.kubeconfig
- Consumer cluster kubeconfig: kind-consumer.kubeconfig
- kube-bind server URL: http://kube-bind.dev.local:8080
- Next steps:
1. Run login to authenticate to the provider cluster:

kubectl bind login http://kube-bind.dev.local:8080

2. Run bind to bind an API service from the provider to the consumer cluster:

KUBECONFIG=kind-consumer.kubeconfig kubectl bind --konnector-host-alias 192.168.155.2:kube-bind.dev.local

Note

Note /etc/hosts modification and 2 commands to run to bind the consumer cluster.

Login to Provider Cluster

This should give you UI authorization screen.

kubectl bind login http://kube-bind.dev.local:8080

Bind First Provider API Service

export KUBECONFIG=kind-consumer.kubeconfig
kubectl bind --konnector-host-alias 192.168.155.2:kube-bind.dev.local

Now in the consumer cluster you should see these CRDs:

kubectl get crd
NAME                              CREATED AT
apiservicebindings.kube-bind.io   2025-11-12T08:10:48Z
mangodbs.mangodb.com              2025-11-12T08:10:56Z

Try creating an example MangoDB resource and observe it being synced to provider clusters:

kubectl bind dev example | kubectl create -f -
KUBECONFIG=kind-consumer.kubeconfig kubectl get mangodbs.mangodb.com
KUBECONFIG=kind-provider.kubeconfig kubectl get mangodbs.mangodb.com

Cleanup

kind bind dev delete