Install

The only requirement is kubectl on your PATH. Every method below installs the same prebuilt Go binary.

With the install script

On Linux or macOS, one command downloads the newest kx, checks it against the release’s SHA256SUMS, and installs it to ~/.local/bin:

curl -fsSL https://jzills.github.io/kx/install.sh | sh

It never uses sudo, and it tells you if the install directory isn’t on your PATH. Two environment variables change what it does:

curl -fsSL https://jzills.github.io/kx/install.sh | KX_VERSION=v0.7.0 sh
curl -fsSL https://jzills.github.io/kx/install.sh \
  | sudo KX_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/bin sh

The first installs a specific release, and the second installs system-wide. Rerunning the script upgrades kx in place. Piping to a shell is a trust decision, so read the script first if you’d rather.

As a kubectl plugin

On krew, kx is published 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.

With uv

From PyPI, uv puts the binary on your PATH in its own environment and keeps it out of everything else — no Python runtime, no dependencies, no compiler. The package is called kx-cli; the command it installs is kx.

uv tool install kx-cli

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.

The newest build is always at the same URL, so on Linux or macOS installing it is one command. Swap linux_amd64 for linux_arm64, darwin_arm64 or darwin_amd64 to match your machine:

curl -sSL \
  https://github.com/jzills/kx/releases/latest/download/kx_linux_amd64.tar.gz \
  | tar xz
sudo install kx/kx /usr/local/bin/kx

That one-liner skips the checksum check. The install script runs it for you, or you can check the archive against SHA256SUMS by hand before installing.

With pipx or pip

The same PyPI package installs with either:

pipx install kx-cli
pip install kx-cli

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. It also names the kubectl on your PATH, which is the one kx runs, so a not found on PATH there is the thing to fix first.

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

Tab completion shows the resource behind each index, 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