Terminal & Shell

Kunobi includes a fully integrated terminal panel that lets you run shell commands, exec into running containers, forward ports from pods, and access node shells — all without leaving the application.

Opening the Terminal

Click the Terminal icon in the left sidebar (the >_ icon) to open the terminal view. The terminal panel has two tabs at the top:

• Terminals — shell sessions (local or in-cluster)
• AI — AI conversations (see AI & MCP)

Individual terminal sessions appear as named tabs inside the Terminals section. Click + to open a new session.

Terminal Types

Local Terminal

A standard shell session on your local machine (bash or zsh, depending on your system). Useful for running kubectl, helm, flux, or any other CLI tools alongside the Kunobi UI.

To open a local terminal:

1. Click Terminal in the left sidebar
2. Click + in the top right of the terminal area

Pod Exec Terminal

Opens a shell session directly inside a running container — equivalent to kubectl exec -it <pod> -- /bin/sh.

To exec into a container:

1. Navigate to the K8s Drilldown page
2. Find the Pod you want to exec into
3. Click on the Pod to open the details sidebar
4. Click Exec in the actions section
5. If the pod has multiple containers, a selector will appear — choose the target container
6. A new terminal tab opens with a shell inside the container

Node Shell

Opens a privileged shell on a Kubernetes node — useful for debugging node-level issues.

To access a node shell:

1. Navigate to K8s Drilldown and select the Nodes resource type
2. Click on a node to open the details sidebar
3. Click Node Shell in the actions section

Note: Node shell access requires cluster-admin permissions and may not be available in all clusters.

Port Forwarding

Forward a port from a pod to your local machine — equivalent to kubectl port-forward.

To start port forwarding:

1. Navigate to K8s Resources and find the Pod
2. Select it — the action bar appears at the top of the table
3. Click port forward (or press Shift+F)
4. In the dialog, enter the Remote Port (the container port) and optionally a Local Port — leave it empty to auto-select
5. Click + Add Port to forward multiple ports at once
6. Click Start Port Forward

Once active, you can access the service at localhost:<local-port>.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Action	macOS	Windows/Linux
Toggle terminal panel	⌘J	Ctrl+J
Copy selection	⌘C	Ctrl+C
Paste	⌘V	Ctrl+V

See Keybindings to customize any of these shortcuts.

Auto-Open Terminal

You can configure the terminal to open automatically when you switch to a page. See Terminal Auto-Open in Settings.