K9k

What if K9s were a real Mac app?

K9s is the best way to operate Kubernetes from a terminal. K9k asks what those same workflows look like as a proper macOS app: a SwiftUI app for macOS 26 with a sidebar of resource kinds, live tables, an inspector, sheets, a command palette and Swift Charts. It's inspired by K9s, not affiliated with it, and K9s is the behavioural reference rather than a code source.

Two processes, on purpose

The app is paired with a bundled Go helper, k9k-core, built on client-go and the Helm SDK. They talk over a versioned NDJSON protocol. The Swift side never reads kubeconfig credentials or endpoints; the helper owns authentication and hands back structured results. Normal operation doesn't shell out to kubectl or helm.

It covers live list and watch across built-in resources and CRDs, logs, a real SwiftTerm terminal into pods, attach and ephemeral debug containers, file transfer, loopback-only port-forwards with an HTTP benchmark, scale, restart and rollback, cordon and drain, dry-run manifest import, Helm history, upgrade and rollback, a graphical kubectl auth can-i, and K9s config, alias and plugin compatibility.

Safe by construction

• Every mutation is checked against RBAC with your real identity, respects read-only mode, and asks for confirmation.
• Read-only mode is replayed into every helper process before every request, so a restarted helper can't come back writable. Before that fix, it could.
• Switching contexts builds every new client before one atomic commit and cancels every old watch, log, exec and port-forward stream. The project's own release audit caught a bug where a failed switch could show the new context while still holding clients for the old cluster; this is the fix.
• Manifest edits are pinned to the object's UID and diffed through a server-side dry run before they apply.
• File transfer streams tar over exec and rejects symlinks, hard links, special files and .. paths in both directions.

Status

K9k was built over 7 and 8 August 2026: 90 commits, with CI (Go race tests on Linux and the macOS 26 app build) green on the last push. A parity ledger pins K9s to a specific commit and maps every capability against K9s source; all 30 rows are still marked Partial, because "Complete" requires the full workflow plus an automated test. It's pre-release, with no signed build. To try it you need macOS 26, Xcode 26 and mise, and the repo can stand up a disposable Kind cluster with seeded workloads.

The source is on GitHub. There's no license for Allison's code yet; the Xcode project was seeded from Apple's Landmarks sample, which carries Apple's sample-code license.