provider-kubernetes
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Published 16 days agoBy upbound
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Support Ends
June 25th 2026
End of Life
December 25th 2026
Overview
The Crossplane Kubernetes provider enables management of Kubernetes Objects.

provider-kubernetes

provider-kubernetes is a Crossplane Provider that enables deployment and management of arbitrary Kubernetes objects on clusters typically provisioned by Crossplane:

  • A Provider resource type that only points to a credentials Secret.
  • An Object resource type that is to manage Kubernetes Objects.
  • A managed resource controller that reconciles Object typed resources and manages arbitrary Kubernetes Objects.

Install

If you would like to install provider-kubernetes without modifications, you may do so using the Crossplane CLI in a Kubernetes cluster where Crossplane is installed:

crossplane xpkg install provider xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/provider-kubernetes:v0.16.0

You may also manually install provider-kubernetes by creating a Provider directly:

apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: provider-kubernetes
spec:
  package: xpkg.upbound.io/upbound/provider-kubernetes:v0.16.0

Developing locally

See the header of go.mod for the minimum supported version of Go.

Start a local development environment with Kind where crossplane is installed:

make
make local-dev

Now you can either run the controller locally or in-cluster.

Running locally

Run controller locally against the cluster:

make run

Since the controller is running outside the Kind cluster, you need to make the API server accessible to the controller. You can do this by running a proxy:

# on a separate terminal
sudo kubectl proxy --port=8081

See below for how to properly setup the RBAC for the locally running controller.

Running in-cluster

Run controller in-cluster:

make local-deploy

See below for how to properly setup the RBAC for the locally running controller.

Required configuration

  1. Prepare provider config for the local cluster:

  2. If provider kubernetes running in the cluster (e.g. provider installed with crossplane or using make local-deploy):

    SA=$(kubectl -n crossplane-system get sa -o name | grep provider-kubernetes | sed -e 's|serviceaccount\/|crossplane-system:|g')
    kubectl create clusterrolebinding provider-kubernetes-admin-binding --clusterrole cluster-admin --serviceaccount="${SA}"
    kubectl apply -f examples/provider/config-in-cluster.yaml
  3. If provider kubernetes running outside the cluster (e.g. running locally with make run)

    KUBECONFIG=$(kind get kubeconfig --name local-dev | sed -e 's|server:\s*.*$|server: http://localhost:8081|g')
    kubectl -n crossplane-system create secret generic cluster-config --from-literal=kubeconfig="${KUBECONFIG}"
    kubectl apply -f examples/provider/config.yaml
  4. Now you can create Object resources with provider reference, see sample object.yaml.

    kubectl create -f examples/object/object.yaml

Cleanup

To delete the local kind cluster:

make controlplane.down
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