Sextant

Sextant is a desktop application for managing Kubernetes clusters — an alternative to Lens, written in Rust on Tauri 2. It reads your kubeconfig, shows the resources of every cluster in live tables and lets you inspect, edit and operate them in one window. Linux, macOS and Windows.

Features

• Your kubeconfig — every context is a cluster; several can be connected at once.

• Cloud clusters — find your Amazon EKS, Google GKE and Azure AKS clusters through the aws, gcloud and az you already use, and add them in a few clicks.

• Every resource in live tables, with details, a YAML editor, scale, restart, cordon, drain and CronJob actions.

• Logs, shells and port forwarding — container logs with search, logs of several pods at once, a shell in any container, debug containers, copying files to and from containers, a shell on a node (a temporary privileged pod, removed when you close it), a local terminal already pointed at the cluster.

• Problems and notifications — everything wrong in a cluster on one page, and desktop notifications for new problems that you can turn off globally, per kind of problem, per cluster or for an hour.

• Command palette (Ctrl+K) to jump to any object or page; rollout history with a diff and rollback.

• Understand the cluster — right-sizing of requests and limits from real usage, cert-manager and the expiry of every TLS certificate, a map of how objects relate (and what a delete would break), RBAC: who can do what.

• In your language — English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, Polish, Turkish, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Korean.

• Metrics from metrics-server and Prometheus; Helm releases and charts; Flux and Argo CD (sync, diff).

• MCP server for AI agents — connect Claude Code, Claude Desktop or Cursor to your clusters, with permissions you set per cluster, confirmations in the window and an activity log.

• No account, no server, no telemetry.

An AI agent asks to scale a deployment; Sextant asks you first and records the call:

Related MCP server: k8s-mcp-go

Install

Download the installer (.deb, .AppImage, .dmg or .msi) from the latest release. The installers are not code-signed, so macOS and Windows warn on first start — see Installation.

Documentation

The wiki describes everything:

• Installation — installers, unsigned builds, updates

• Getting started — kubeconfig, cloud clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS), connecting, the window

• Using Sextant — tables, YAML, logs, shells (containers and nodes), port forwarding, Helm, Flux, Argo CD

• Problems and notifications — a cluster's problems on one page, desktop notifications and how to turn them off

• Right-sizing, cert-manager and certificates, Resource map, RBAC

• Gateway API — Gateways and routes with explained problems, topology, the request check and the hostname map

• Installing Flux and Argo CD — from the app: sources and checks, rights, preview, removing them by hand

• MCP server — AI agents: setup, permissions, confirmations, security

• Extensions and Writing extensions — your own pages, panels, actions and columns in isolated frames, with permissions you agree to; the SDK in sdk/

• Settings and Troubleshooting

• Building from source, Development and Translating — the translations are machine-made; corrections from native speakers are welcome

Community

Questions, ideas and projects go to Discussions: Q&A for help, Ideas for suggestions, Show and tell for what you built. Found a bug? Open an issue.

Roadmap

What we plan for the next releases. Each release is a milestone with one issue per feature; plans can change, and ideas are welcome in Discussions.

Further out: resource templates and forms, code-signed installers (#20), a mobile app (#17).

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)

• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT)

at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.