How to install the EKSCTL command line tool

eksctl is the command-line tool specifically designed to simplify the creation and management of clusters in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). It provides a simple, declarative way to create and manage EKS clusters and the associated infrastructure, leveraging AWS CloudFormation under the hood. 

To install it (in Linux) we need to follow these steps:

• Download eksctl:

curl --silent --location "https://github.com/weaveworks/eksctl/releases/latest/download/eksctl_$(uname -s)_amd64.tar.gz" | tar xz -C /tmp

• To run it properly, the directory where the eksctl binary is located should be included in the PATH environment variable. For this, we've got two options:

Option 1 - Copy the binary to a directory in your PATH env variable. 

• Run the following command to know what directories are defined in your PATH

echo $PATH

• For example, we could move it to /usr/local/bin with the command

sudo mv /tmp/eksctl /usr/local/bin/eksctl

Option 2 - Append the directory where you want to have kubectl to the PATH 

• Run the following command

export PATH=$PATH:[/YOUR/EKSCTL/PATH]

• Get the version of eksctl to verify the installation was successful:

eksctl version

How to use the eksctl tool

Here's a brief list of things that you can do with eksctl:

1. Create , Delete , get list of clusters
2. create, drain and delete node groups
3. scale a node group
4. Update a cluster
5. use custom AMI’s
6. Configure VPC Networking
7. Configure Access to VPC Endpoints
8. Support for GPU node groups
9. Spot instances and mixed instances
10. List of cluster cloudformation Stacks
11. Install Core DNS
12. Write Kubeconfig file for cluster

In this web site you'll find all you need to know to use the eksctl tool.