Launch Lens Desktop Kube#

Lens paid subscription feature

Lens Desktop Kube is enabled by default. In some cases, you may need to start it manually.

Prerequisites#

Note

Lens Desktop Kube is not available for virtual machines deployed through the Parallels software.

Lens Desktop Kube requires stable connection to Internet on all platforms.

To run Lens Desktop Kube in Lens Desktop for Windows, make sure that:

You are running Windows 10 version 2004 and higher (Build 19041 and higher) or Windows 11.
WSL2 is installed. See Install Linux with WSL for detailed instructions.
Hyper-V is installed and enabled both in BIOS and System Preferences. See Install Hyper-V on Windows 10 for detailed instructions.
You are using an official Ubuntu distribution. See WSL Documentation: Install Linux on Windows with WSL.

URL allowlist#

If your network configurations require specifying allowed URLs, add the following to your allow list:

https://api.k8slens.dev/*
https://downloads.k8slens.dev/*

Start Lens Desktop Kube#

Warning

To avoid port conflicts, stop all local clusters, such as Minikube, Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, and others, before running Lens Desktop Kube.

To start your local Kubernetes cluster, click LDK > Start in the lower-right corner. On initial launch, Lens Desktop downloads the cluster image. So, it can take several minutes before your local cluster is up and running.

On Windows machines, newly created Lens Desktop clusters may not have any available nodes. Try creating a new profile in this case.

LDK does not start on Windows?

LDK may fail to start on certain versions of WSL.

Workaround:

Ensure that you are using WSL version 1.3.17.0 or lower.
Create a new LDK profile.
Enable Mount local home folder when setting up the new profile.

Reset Lens Desktop Kube#

To reset the local cluster:

Click LDK > Settings
In Lens Desktop Kubernetes Profiles, select the active profile and click Options to the right from the Status column.
Click Reset and confirm the reset in the following dialog menu.

Disable Lens Desktop Kube#

You can remove Lens Desktop Kube from the Lens Desktop interface. However, this action does not remove the cluster-related data.

To disable Lens Desktop Kube:

Click LDK > Settings
Toggle Enable Lens Desktop Kubernetes on this machine.

See also