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Install Lens Desktop#

Lens Desktop is lightweight and simple to install. You will be up and running in just a few minutes.

For a complete list of available installation options, check out the Lens web site.

System requirements#

Before you proceed with Lens installation, verify that your system meets the system requirements.

Hardware requirements#

Lens is a less than 300 MB download and has a disk footprint of 600 MB. Lens is lightweight and runs easily on any modern hardware.

Minimum hardware requirements:

  • 2 GHz or faster processor
  • 1 GB of RAM

Platforms#

Lens has been tested on the following platforms:

  • macOS
  • Windows
  • Linux

Install Lens Desktop on macOS#

  1. Download Lens Desktop from the Lens web site for macOS.
  2. Open the browser's download list and locate the downloaded archive.
  3. Select the 'magnifying glass' icon to open the archive in Finder.
  4. Double-click Lens-{version}.dmg and drag Lens.app to the Applications folder, making it available in the macOS Launchpad.
  5. Add Lens to your Dock by right-clicking on the icon to bring up the context menu and choosing Options, Keep in Dock.

Windows#

  1. Download the Lens installer for Windows.
  2. Once it is downloaded, run the installer Lens-Setup-{version}.exe. This will only take a minute.
  3. By default, Lens is installed under C:\users\{username}\AppData\Local\Programs\Lens.

Installing with CLI#

It is possible to install Lens with CLI to provide the required arguments. This is useful for corporate device and software management systems (MDM and MAM) like Microsoft Intune.

Available arguments

  • /currentuser - Install for current user (default).
  • /allusers - Install system wide, for all users.
  • /disableAutoUpdates - Disable autoupdates (Application will not update automatically).
  • /D="path"- Installation path, default: 'C:\users{username}\AppData\Local\Programs\Lens'.
  • /S - Silent install
Example

Install silently (no user input required) for all users with (system-wide) at the provided location.

$ `Lens-Setup-{version}.exe /S /allusers /disableAutoUpdates /D="D:/install/Lens"`

Linux#

See the Lens Website for a complete list of available installation options.

After installing Lens manually (not using a package manager file such as .deb or .rpm) the following will need to be done to allow protocol handling. This assumes that your linux distribution uses xdg-open and the xdg-* suite of programs for determining which application can handle custom URIs.

  1. Create a file called lens.desktop in either ~/.local/share/applications/ or /usr/share/applications (if you have permissions and are installing Lens for all users).
  2. That file should have the following contents, with <path/to/executable> being the absolute path to where you have installed the unpacked Lens executable: 
    [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;
  3. Then run the following command: 
    xdg-settings set default-url-scheme-handler lens lens.desktop
  4. If that succeeds (exits with code 0) then your Lens install should be set up to handle lens:// URIs.

Snap#

  1. Download the Lens package for Snap.
  2. Once it is downloaded, run snap install command:
sudo snap install Lens-{version}.amd64.snap --dangerous --classic

Update Cadence#

Lens releases a new version each month with new features and important bug fixes. Lens supports auto updating and you will be prompted to install the new release when it becomes available!

Note

Auto updates are avalailable only for exe, dmg and AppImage versions.

To stay current with the Lens features, you can review the release notes.

Next Steps#