Quickstart

This guide walks you through connecting your first cluster to Octokube and giving your team access. By the end, every engineer you invite will have a personalized, real-time view of your cluster — scoped to exactly what they are allowed to see.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• A Kubernetes cluster (local or cloud-hosted)
• kubectl configured and pointing to that cluster
• An Octokube account — sign up for free if you do not have one yet

Step 1 — Create a workspace

After signing in, you will be prompted to create a workspace. A workspace is the top-level container for your clusters, team members, and Virtual RBAC rules.

1. Enter a name for your workspace — typically your company or team name
2. Click Create workspace

Step 2 — Connect your cluster

From your workspace dashboard, click Add cluster.

Octokube will generate a manifest for the Agent — a lightweight component that runs inside your cluster and is the only piece that ever communicates with the kube-apiserver.

Apply the manifest to your cluster:

kubectl apply -f https://dash.octokube.app/agent/manifest/<your-token>

This will:

• Create a dedicated namespace for the Octokube Agent
• Deploy the Agent as a single pod
• Establish a persistent outbound connection to the Octokube backend

You can verify the Agent is running with:

kubectl get pods -n octokube-system

You should see the Agent pod with a Running status within a few seconds.

Once the Agent connects, your cluster will appear as Connected in the dashboard.

Step 3 — Explore your cluster

With the Agent connected, open the Web IDE from your workspace dashboard. You will see your cluster resources in real time — Pods, Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, and more.

At this point you are connected as the workspace owner, so you have full visibility. In the next steps you will invite your team and scope their access.

Step 4 — Invite your team

Go to Settings → Team and click Invite member.

Enter the engineer's email address and select a base role:

The invited engineer will receive an email with a link to join your workspace. They can sign in with their own account — no kubeconfig, no credentials, no local setup required.

Step 5 — Define access rules (optional)

The base roles above are a starting point. If you need more granular control — access scoped to a specific namespace, a specific resource, or a specific time window — head to Settings → Virtual RBAC.

From there you can create rules like:

• User A can view Pods in namespace: production, read-only, Monday to Friday 09:00–18:00
• Team B has editor access to Deployments in namespace: staging only
• User C has no access to Secrets in any namespace

Changes to Virtual RBAC rules take effect immediately — no redeployment required.

For a full guide on Virtual RBAC, see Virtual RBAC.

You are set up

Your cluster is connected, your team has access, and everyone is looking at the same live cluster state — each scoped to exactly what they are allowed to see.

From here you can:

• Connect additional clusters
• Learn how Virtual RBAC works in depth
• Explore the platform features
• Read the Architecture page if you want to understand what is running inside your cluster