TL;DR

Nobody uses all of kubectl. Working engineers cycle through maybe thirty commands, organised by the job in front of them: look, deploy, debug, clean up. This cheat sheet is organised the same way — by job, not alphabetically.

The three habits that prevent most kubectl accidents: check your context before you type, use --dry-run and diff before you apply, and treat delete , drain and --force as loaded tools (there is a whole section on the commands that bite).

Secrets get their own safety rules: base64 is encoding, not encryption , and --from-literal leaves values in your shell history.…