kubectl error: “The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused – did you specify the right host or port?”

Posted on by

Problem

You want to use the kubectl to get your cluster information but you are getting the following error message

$ kubectl cluster-info
 To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.
 The connection to the server localhost:8080 was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

Solution

That could happen if you have already setup kubectl before or have used a different environment.

So you will need to first unset the environment variable KUBECONFIG with:

$ unset KUBECONFIG

and then use the gcloud client to set your environment again:


$ gcloud container clusters get-credentials your_cluster_name --zone europe-west2-a --project your_project_name

So after this you should be able to use kubectl to get the cluster information

kubeconfig entry generated for your_cluster_name.

$ kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes master is running at https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
GLBCDefaultBackend is running at https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/default-http-backend:http/proxy
Heapster is running at https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/heapster/proxy
KubeDNS is running at https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy
Metrics-server is running at https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/https:metrics-server:/proxy