[Solved] gke-gcloud-auth-plugin, was not found or is not executable

If you have installed gcloud CLI and setup a GKE cluster. However, when you try to connect to the GKE cluster using gcloud command you get the following error.

CRITICAL: ACTION REQUIRED: gke-gcloud-auth-plugin, which is needed for continued use of kubectl, was not found or is not executable. Install gke-gcloud-auth-plugin for use with kubectl by following https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/cluster-access-for-kubectl#install_plugin

This issue is caused due to the authentication changes in GKE v1.26. To rectify this issue you need to install the kubectl gke-gcloud-auth-plugin so that you can use kubectl to connect to GKE clusters.

gke-gcloud-auth-plugin is based on the official client-go credential plugins that is focussed on client side integration with support or LDAP, Kerberos, OAuth2, SAML, etc. gcloud auth is based on OAuth2.

Install gke-gcloud-auth-plugin

You can install the gke-gcloud-auth-plugin plugin using the following gcloud command.

gcloud components install gke-gcloud-auth-plugin

Validate gke-gcloud-auth-plugin

To validate the gke-gcloud-auth-plugin, you can run the gcloud command to connect to the Kubernetes cluster.

Here is an example command that you get from the GKE console.

$ gcloud container clusters get-credentials prometheus-cluster --zone us-central1-c --project aerial-reef-417506


Fetching cluster endpoint and auth data.
kubeconfig entry generated for prometheus-cluster.

As you can see from the output, the authentication is successfull and the GKE cluster configuration is added as the kubeconfig entry.

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