The Crossplane CLI helps simplify some development and administration aspects of Crossplane.

The Crossplane CLI includes commands for:

  • building, installing, updating and pushing Crossplane Packages
  • building platforms using Crossplane Projects
  • testing and rendering standalone Composition Functions without the need to access a Kubernetes cluster running Crossplane
  • troubleshooting Crossplane Compositions, Composite Resources and Managed Resources

Installing the CLI

The Crossplane CLI is a single standalone binary with no external dependencies. Some commands, such as crossplane composition render and crossplane project build, do require a Docker compatible container runtime.

Note

Install the Crossplane CLI on a user’s computer.

Most Crossplane CLI commands are independent of Kubernetes and don’t require access to a Crossplane pod.

You can download the latest version using the install script:

1curl -sfL "https://cli.crossplane.io/install.sh" | sh

The script detects your operating system and CPU architecture and downloads the appropriate binary to the current directory. Note that it doesn’t attempt to place the binary in your shell’s $PATH, so you may want to move it.

If you don’t want to run shell script you can manually download a binary from the Crossplane releases repository at https://cli.crossplane.io/stable/current/bin

Move the binary to a location in your $PATH, for example /usr/local/bin.

Download other CLI versions

You can download different Crossplane CLI versions or different release branches with the XP_CHANNEL and XP_VERSION environmental variables.

By default the CLI installs from the XP_CHANNEL named stable and the XP_VERSION of current, matching the most recent stable release.

For example, to install CLI version v2.3.0 add XP_VERSION=v2.3.0 to the download script curl command:

1curl -sfL "https://cli.crossplane.io/install.sh" | XP_VERSION=v2.3.0 sh

To install the latest build from the main branch, use the master channel by adding XP_CHANNEL=master:

1curl -sfL "https://cli.crossplane.io/install.sh" | XP_CHANNEL=master sh