Settings

Open Settings with ⌘,, the gear at the bottom of the context rail, or ⌘K → Open Settings. It has four tabs — General, Kubernetes, Shortcuts and Extensions — plus any tab an extension adds.

General

Appearance

Eleven themes, applied to the whole app, the terminal included.

Dark	Light
kdashboard (default), Gruvbox Dark, Solarized Dark, Everforest Dark, Dracula, Monokai	Gruvbox Light, Solarized Light, Everforest Light, Rose Pine Dawn, GitHub Light

Table Display

Density	Rows
Comfortable (default)	36 px, with room for a status pill on every row
Compact	30 px
Terminal	26 px, in a mono face — like a k9s pane

The same choice is in every table’s toolbar.

AI Agent

• Require approval for agent mutations — on by default. Every change the agent requests waits for your Approve or Deny. Turn it off only on clusters where an unattended change is acceptable.
• Expose to external AI tools (MCP server) — off by default. See MCP server.

Kubernetes

Contexts

Give each context a label, an icon and a colour, or remove it from the kubeconfig. See Clusters and namespaces.

Kubeconfig

The path of the kubeconfig to use; empty means ~/.kube/config. Below it, Import another kubeconfig merges contexts from a file or from pasted YAML.

Prometheus

Optional. metrics-server only knows the latest reading, so anything over time needs a Prometheus.

Enter a URL that is reachable from your machine — an ingress URL, or http://localhost:9090 while you port-forward the Prometheus service — then Test and Save. Test runs a query for up and tells you how many series came back.

It enables:

• an hour of CPU and memory history in pod details, and replica history on autoscalers;
• seven-day P95 rightsizing;
• the query_prometheus tool of the agent.

kdashboard sends plain, unauthenticated requests to that URL: there are no fields for a token or basic auth, and it does not discover an in-cluster Prometheus by itself. Clear the field and Save to turn it off.

Cost Pricing

Refresh Pricing clears the cached cloud price lists, so the next visit to Cost downloads them again. Prices change about once a month; you rarely need this.

Shortcuts

A read-only list of every keyboard shortcut. Shortcuts cannot be rebound.

Extensions

Lists the installed extensions with their state, and has Open folder, Reload app and API docs.

Updates

kdashboard checks for a new version once, shortly after it starts, and shows a banner when there is one. On Linux and Windows, Update now downloads it and restarts. On macOS the banner gives you the Homebrew command to copy. There is no setting to turn the check off. See Install and update.

Files on disk

Everything lives in one folder:

OS	Folder
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/kdashboard
Linux	~/.config/kdashboard
Windows	%APPDATA%\kdashboard

File	Contents
settings.json	Your settings, context labels, pinned resources, saved views, saved port-forwards, watched resources, extension storage — and the MCP token, in plain text
pricing/	Cached cloud price lists
openapi-cache/	The clusters’ OpenAPI schemas, for YAML linting
login-shell.path	The PATH of your login shell
extensions/	Your extensions

Also:

• ~/.kdashboard/agent-workspace/ — the empty folder the agent CLI runs in. Safe to delete.
• Your kubeconfig — modified when you switch context (current-context), and when you import or remove contexts, after a backup.
• Open tabs, column choices and panel sizes are kept in the app’s local storage.

Cluster data — resources, logs, Secret values, scan results — stays in memory and is never written to disk. kdashboard sends no telemetry. The complete list of what leaves your machine is on the security page.

To reset kdashboard, quit it and delete the folder.