Full krew support

[ttiurani]

Right now krew support seems to be lacking. The problem is that even while the binary krew is possible to install from the registry, that doesn't mean krew is usable and accessible via kubectl.

For kubectl krew to match, there needs to be a kubectl-krew binary in PATH. Krew does this with krew install krew which creates a bin/ subdirectory within KREW_ROOT (defaults to ~/.krew) that has the symlink kubectl-krew. Krew installation instructions then require that the user to adds this bin/ subdirectory to their PATH manually. Then after you install plugins with kubectl krew install commands the bin/ subdirectory gets more symlinks with a kubectl- prefix which kubectl picks up.

It would be great if Mise could have support for Krew in a way where krew install krew is issued to a Mise-controlled directory and then this bin/ path would go to PATH with Mise's normal logic.

That would make it possible to have both Krew and kubectl sandboxed with Mise and still make it possible to install Krew plugins e.g. from a postinstall hook. Even better would be if in .mise.toml the tools section entry of Krew could include the plugins that should be installed. That way there would not need to be postinstall hacks at all.

Edit. Full krew support is now possible with the krew-plugin 🎉

[risu729]

If you don't want to use postinstall hooks, I think you need to write a vfox plugin for it.
https://mise.jdx.dev/tool-plugin-development.html

[PadenZach]

longer term, an entire krew backend would be nice :)

[risu729]

You can make a backend plugin for it
https://mise.jdx.dev/plugins.html#backend-plugins

[soupglasses]

I made an initial effort using the vfox-backend plugin architecture. Check it out here:

https://github.com/soupglasses/mise-krew

Also, absolutely no promises anything works, its quite hacky. 😅

[ttiurani]

Thanks for the reply! For me the point of this discussion is that I don't want to have to install krew before using mise. Because I currently have to do that, this works fine:

[hooks]
postinstall = "kubectl krew update && kubectl krew install cnpg"

The annoying part is exactly the step to install krew, because that means that our team's basic setup instructions for everything now need to be:

"1. install mise, 2. install krew, 3. Clone project.."

and I'd much rather they be:

"1. Install mise, 2. Clone project..."

[stevewm]

Why not just install krew with mise? This works for example:

[plugins]
krew="https://github.com/soupglasses/mise-krew"

[tools]
"aqua:kubectl" = "latest"
"ubi:kubernetes-sigs/krew" = "latest"
"krew:cnpg"="latest"

[ttiurani]

Thanks @stevewm ! The above does indeed roughly work.

However, when I don't have a global krew installed, when I cd out of the directory and then cd back, I always get this warning:

mise WARN  Failed to resolve tool version list for krew:cnpg: [~/mytest/.mise.toml] krew:cnpg@latest: Backend list versions method failed: runtime error: ...re/mise/plugins/krew/hooks/backend_list_versions.lua:16: krew command 'krew' not found in PATH
stack traceback:
        [C]: in function 'error'
        ...re/mise/plugins/krew/hooks/backend_list_versions.lua:16: in function 'PLUGIN.BackendListVersions'
        (...tail calls...)

This is perhaps bug in the plugin @soupglasses ?

Edit. Oh, it's probably just this known issue: soupglasses/mise-krew#1

[soupglasses]

These sorts of issues should now be all fixed with version 2.0.0 of mise-krew. Let me know if you hit any issues! 😄

[ttiurani]

Thank you @soupglasses ! I tested the latest version (after I realized I had to run mise plugins update to get it), and it looks like it works perfectly, no need to pre-install krew anymore.