Lens Desktop is lightweight and simple to install on all major platforms. Download Lens Desktop and start managing your Kubernetes clusters comfortably and efficiently. This page contains installation instructions for various platforms and covers other related topics.
Before installing Lens Desktop, verify that your computer meets the system requirements.
Minimum hardware requirements:
2 GHz or faster processor
1 GB of RAM
1 GB of disk space
Supported operating systems:
macOS
Windows
Linux
Warning
Lens Desktop may work on operating systems that are beyond their end-of-life date. However, we recommend staying on supported versions of the operating system. See details about support lifecycles of various operating systems on endoflife.date .
Some Lens Desktop features, such as Lens Desktop Kube, require stable internet connection. If your network configuration restricts outbound connections, add the following URLs to your allow list:
https://api.k8slens.dev/*
https://downloads.k8slens.dev/*
If your network configurations require specifying allowed IP addresses, please refer to the list of required IP addresses.
Install Lens Desktop by running the Lens-Setup-<VERSION>.exe installer. The default Lens Desktop installation path is C:\users\<username>\AppData\Local\Programs\Lens.
Optional. Download and install snap. Find Linux distributions that do not have pre-installed snap and installation instructions in Snap tutorials: Installing snapd .
Some features of Lens Desktop require protocol handling. For the AppImage, or other manually installed instances, protocol handling must be enabled separately.
Note
It assumed that your Linux distribution uses xdg-open and the xdg-* suite of programs for determining which application can handle custom URIs.
Create a file called lens.desktop in one of the following directories:
~/.local/share/applications/
/usr/share/applications
In lens.desktop, specify the absolute path to the unpacked Lens executable. Specify other parameters as follows:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Lens
Exec=<path/to/executable> %U
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=lens
StartupWMClass=Lens
Comment=Lens - The Kubernetes IDE
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/lens;
Categories=Network;
Set the default handler:
xdg-settings set default-url-scheme-handler lens lens.desktop
If xdg-settings returns an exit code of 0, Lens Desktop is capable of handling lens:// URIs.
When updating to a major Lens Desktop version, user data such as clusters, preferences, and other configurations migrates to new data structures. However, we recommend that you back up your user data. Below are the default user data locations: