gcloud does not add access token for connecting to GKE cluster

Question

I created a GKE cluster and to connect to it with kubectl ran the command that appears when clicked on Connect button against my cluster.

gcloud container clusters get-credentials cluster-name --zone us-central1-a --project project-id

In $HOME/.kube/config I see entries as below:

- name: cluster-name
  user:
    auth-provider:
      config:
        cmd-args: config config-helper --format=json
        cmd-path: /usr/lib64/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud
        expiry-key: '{.credential.token_expiry}'
        token-key: '{.credential.access_token}'
      name: gcp

To add a new namespace, I did the following:

kubectl config use-context cluster-name
kubectl create namespace demo

This results in error:

error: No Auth Provider found for name "gcp"

I repeated the step of adding the credentials in the Google Cloud shell. There, I am able to create a new namespace successfully. I noticed that, the access-token and expiry fields are visible.

auth-provider:
      config:
        access-token: omitted
        cmd-args: config config-helper --format=json
        cmd-path: /google/google-cloud-sdk/bin/gcloud
        expiry: "2019-12-10T03:39:53Z"
        expiry-key: '{.credential.token_expiry}'
        token-key: '{.credential.access_token}'
      name: gcp

Therefore, how do I get the gcloud containers cluster get-credentials command to update my kubeconfig correctly?

Answer 1

I ran into this exact problem, and it turned out my client was out of date. Running v1.11 for the client and my cluster was 1.15+ gave me the no auth provider error.

Followed the instructions here to get up to client v1.18 and solved my issue.