The usual choice is kubectl cp:

kubectl cp ./local-dir my-dev-pod:/tmp/remote-dir

It works, but I wanted something better for a development workflow.

When I'm making changes locally and syncing them to a pod repeatedly, I don't want to transfer everything every time. I want rsync's incremental synchronization that is only the files that have changed should be transferred.

So I started wondering:

Could I make rsync work with kubectl?

The rsync -e option

It turns out that rsync has exactly the mechanism I needed: the -e option.

The -e option allows rsync to specify the remote shell command it should use for connecting to the remote machine.

For example, I created a small rsh.sh script:

#!/bin/bash

POD="$1"
shift

kubectl exec -i "$POD" -- "$@"

Then I could tell rsync to use this script as its remote shell:

rsync -avzP -e ./rsh.sh \
  ~/major1201/local-dir/ \
  my-dev-pod:/tmp/remote-dir/

And it worked.

sending incremental file list
./
1.txt
              4 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#1, to-chk=2/4)
b/
b/2.txt
              4 100%    3.91kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#2, to-chk=0/4)

sent 233 bytes  received 65 bytes  198.67 bytes/sec
total size is 8  speedup is 0.03

The important part wasn't the transfer itself. It was that rsync was doing the synchronization while kubectl exec provided the connection to the pod.

The flow looked like this: rsync -> rsh.sh -> kubectl exec -> kubernetes Pod

And that's the idea behind kubectl-rsync

Once I had the proof of concept working, I packaged the idea into a kubectl plugin.

Now the same operation can be written as:

kubectl rsync \
  ~/major1201/local-dir/ \
  my-dev-pod:/tmp/remote-dir/

Under the hood, kubectl-rsync acts as an rsync transport shim. It connects rsync to the pod through kubectl exec, allowing rsync to handle the file synchronization.

This means I can use rsync features such as incremental transfers, compression, progress reporting, and partial transfers while still using my existing Kubernetes authentication and kubectl workflow.

kubectl cp vs kubectl-rsync

kubectl cp is great for simple, one-time file copies. But when you repeatedly synchronize a directory between your local machine and a pod, kubectl-rsync provides the rsync workflow you may already be familiar with.

Install it with Krew

If you already have Krew installed, you can install the plugin with:

kubectl krew install rsync

Try it out

The project is open source:

https://github.com/major1201/kubectl-rsync

If you work with Kubernetes pods and frequently move files between your local machine and development environments, I'd love to hear what you think.

If you find it useful, consider giving the project a star on GitHub.