Install

kx needs kubectl on your PATH and nothing else. Every path below delivers the same prebuilt Go binary: no Python runtime, no dependencies, no compiler.

The package is called kx-cli; the command it installs is kx.

With uv

uv is the recommended path — it puts the binary on your PATH in its own environment and keeps it out of everything else.

uv tool install kx-cli

With pipx

pipx install kx-cli

With pip

pip install kx-cli

As a kubectl plugin

kx is published to krew under the name idx.

kubectl krew install idx
alias kx="kubectl idx"

The alias is worth setting: every example in these docs is written as kx, and kubectl idx describe 2 is a long way to say kx describe 2.

Standalone binaries

Builds for Linux, macOS and Windows on both amd64 and arm64 are attached to every GitHub Release, with checksums in SHA256SUMS. Download, verify, and drop the binary somewhere on your PATH.

Without installing anything

uvx --from kx-cli kx get pods
pipx run --spec kx-cli kx get pods

Both fetch the package, run it, and leave nothing behind. Handy on a machine you don’t own — though the saved listing still lands in ~/.kx/, so the index workflow works across those invocations too.

Verify it

kx --version

That prints the version, the commit it was built from, the Go toolchain and platform, and the paths kx reads its config and state from.

On macOS, the first run of a freshly installed krew plugin or standalone binary takes a few seconds while Gatekeeper scans it. Later runs are unaffected until the next install. Getting it over with up front — kx --version >/dev/null — is nicer than discovering it mid-incident.

Shell completion

kx completes indexes with the resource each one points at, so kx describe <TAB> offers 1 api-7d8f (Pod) rather than a bare number. See completion for the per-shell setup.

Quickstart walks through the first listing and what you can do with it.

Quickstart