Manual Installation (Linux, MacOS and Windows)

1. Download the latest release from the releases page for your target machine.

2. Untar the release, make the binary executable and move it to a directory in your $PATH (as shown below).

tar -zxvf kubectl-ai_Darwin_arm64.tar.gz
chmod a+x kubectl-ai
sudo mv kubectl-ai /usr/local/bin/

Install with Krew (Linux/macOS/Windows)

First of all, you need to have krew installed, refer to krew document for more details Then you can install with krew

kubectl krew install ai

Now you can invoke kubectl-ai as a kubectl plugin like this: kubectl ai.

Install on NixOS

There are multiple ways to install kubectl-ai on NixOS. For a permanent installation add the following to your NixOS-Configuration:

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    kubectl-ai
  ];

For a temporary installation, you can use the following command:

nix-shell -p kubectl-ai

Using AI models running locally (ollama or llama.cpp)

You can use kubectl-ai with AI models running locally. kubectl-ai supports ollama and llama.cpp to use the AI models running locally.

Additionally, the modelserving directory provides tools and instructions for deploying your own llama.cpp-based LLM serving endpoints locally or on a Kubernetes cluster. This allows you to host models like Gemma directly in your environment.

An example of using Google's gemma3 model with ollama:

# assuming ollama is already running and you have pulled one of the gemma models
# ollama pull gemma3:12b-it-qat

# if your ollama server is a

... [View full README on GitHub](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubectl-ai#readme)