Sometimes when working with a new Kubernetes cluster you will be given a config file to use when
authenticating with the cluster. This file should be placed at ~/.kube/config
. However you may
already have an existing config file at that location and you need to merge them together.
Here is a quick command you can run to merge your two config files.
# Make a copy of your existing config
$ cp ~/.kube/config ~/.kube/config.bak
# Merge the two config files together into a new config file
$ KUBECONFIG=~/.kube/config:/path/to/new/config kubectl config view --flatten > /tmp/config
# Replace your old config with the new merged config
$ mv /tmp/config ~/.kube/config
# (optional) Delete the backup once you confirm everything worked ok
$ rm ~/.kube/config.bak
Here is all of that (except the cleanup) as a one-liner.
$ cp ~/.kube/config ~/.kube/config.bak && KUBECONFIG=~/.kube/config:/path/to/new/config kubectl config view --flatten > /tmp/config && mv /tmp/config ~/.kube/config