Use Port Forwarding to Access Applications in a Cluster

If you need to connect directly to a tcp-port in a pod you can do this with port forwarding.

So for example to access the redis pod in the namespace redis you will use this on the client:

kubectl port-forward redis1-master-0 6379:6379 -n redis

"redis1-master" is the pod name.

You can then access redis with a client to localhost:6379

Get pod names

To get all pod names from namespace redis use the following:

$ kubectl get pods -n redis
NAME                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
redis1-master-0     1/1     Running   0          39h
redis1-replicas-0   1/1     Running   0          39h
redis1-replicas-1   1/1     Running   0          39h
redis1-replicas-2   1/1     Running   0          39h

Links

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/port-forward-access-application-cluster/