You can also download the distribution manually. Download a distribution for the client host from where you will be executing the commands to access Kubernetes:
<a href=”https://packages.konghq.com/public/kuma-legacy/raw/names/kuma-darwin-amd64/versions/{“edition”=>”kuma”, “version”=>”2.9.0”, “release”=>”2.9.x”, “latest”=>true, “releaseDate”=>”2024-10-22”, “endOfLifeDate”=>”2025-10-22”, “branch”=>”release-2.9”}/kuma-{“edition”=>”kuma”, “version”=>”2.9.0”, “release”=>”2.9.x”, “latest”=>true, “releaseDate”=>”2024-10-22”, “endOfLifeDate”=>”2025-10-22”, “branch”=>”release-2.9”}-darwin-amd64.tar.gz”>macOS</a> or run brew install kumactl
and extract the archive with:
tar xvzf kuma-*.tar.gz
2. Run Kuma
Once downloaded, you will find the contents of Kuma in the kuma- folder. In this folder, you will find - among other files - the bin directory that stores the executables for Kuma, including the CLI client kumactl.
Note: On Kubernetes - of all the Kuma binaries in the bin folder - we only need kumactl.
So we enter the bin folder by executing:
cd kuma-*/bin
Finally we can install and run Kuma in either standalone or multi-zone mode:
Multi-zone mode is perfect when running one deployment of Kuma that spans across multiple Kubernetes clusters, clouds and VM environments under the same Kuma deployment.
This mode also supports hybrid Kubernetes + VMs deployments.
We suggest adding the kumactl executable to your PATH so that it’s always available in every working directory. Or - alternatively - you can also create link in /usr/local/bin/ by executing:
ln-s$PWD/kumactl /usr/local/bin/kumactl
It may take a while for Kubernetes to start the Kuma resources, you can check the status by executing:
kubectl get pod -n kuma-system
3. Use Kuma
Kuma (kuma-cp) will be installed in the newly created kuma-system namespace! Now that Kuma has been installed, you can access the control-plane via either the GUI, kubectl, the HTTP API, or the CLI:
And then you can navigate to 127.0.0.1:5681 to see the HTTP API.
You can use the kumactl CLI to perform read-only operations on Kuma resources. The kumactl binary is a client to the Kuma HTTP API, you will need to first port-forward the API service with:
