Not supported by

kubectl

or the

kube-apiserver

as of this writing (AFAIK), but a workaround would be:

$ kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp | tail -n +2 | tac

or if tac is not available (MacOS X):

$ kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp | tail -n +2 | tail -r

If you want the header:

$ echo 'NAME                                                              READY   STATUS             RESTARTS   AGE' | \
 kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp | tail -n +2 | tac

You might just have to adjust the tabs on the header accordingly. Or if you don't want to use

tail -n +2

you can use

--no-headers

. For example:

$ kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp --no-headers | tac

It Is Quite EASY: Once you have used

--no-headers

option, the HEADER will not be part of output (ascending ordered-listing of pods) and you can simply reverse sort the outcome of the command.

Here's the complete command to get exactly what is expected:

kubectl get po --sort-by={metadata.creationTimestamp} --no-headers | tac

Sorted

kubectl

output and

awk

provide the table view with a header. Installation of extra tools is not needed.

# kubectl get pods --sort-by=.status.startTime | awk 'NR == 1; NR > 1 {print $0 | "tac"}'

An approach with JSON processor offered by paulogrell works also but could require more effort: for some Linux distributions you'll need to download and compile

jq

from source code. As for the

jq

command line I'd suggest to add the "name" to the

map

parameters and sort by "timestamp":

# kubectl get pods -o json | jq '.items | group_by(.metadata.creationTimestamp) | map({"name": .[0].metadata.name, "timestamp": .[0].metadata.creationTimestamp, "count": length}) | sort_by(.timestamp)'

If you are looking for a way to find the latest pod, try:

kubectl get pod --selector='app=my-app-name' \
  --sort-by='.metadata.creationTimestamp' \
  -o=jsonpath='{.items[-1].metadata.name}'

I believe the Kubernetes API doesnt support this option yet, but as a workaround you can use a JSON processor (jq) to adjust its output.

Ascending

kubectl get pods -o json | jq '.items | group_by(.metadata.creationTimestamp) | map({"timestamp": .[0].metadata.creationTimestamp, "count": length}) | sort_by(.count)'

Descending

kubectl get pods -o json | jq '.items | group_by(.metadata.creationTimestamp) | map({"timestamp": .[0].metadata.creationTimestamp, "count": length}) | sort_by(.count) | reverse'

Hope this helps

A simpler version that works on MacOS and retains arbitrary headers:

kubectl get node --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp | { read -r headers; echo "$headers"; tail -r; }

On Windows, can use Powershell:

kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp --no-headers | sort -Descending