<p>I'm trying to spin up a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster on GCE. When I run</p>

<pre><code>gcloud components update kubectl
</code></pre>

<p>on a Windows machine I get</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>ERROR: (gcloud.components.update) The following components are unknown [kubectl]</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Update (May 2016): As of <a href="https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/release-notes#march_29_2016" rel="nofollow">late March 2016</a>, gcloud will now install kubectl for windows. </p>

<hr>

<p>gcloud won't currently install kubectl on windows (hence the error). You can download a recent kubectl binary directly from GCS instead (<code>gsutil cp gs://kubernetes-release/release/v1.0.0/bin/windows/amd64/kubectl.exe kubectl.exe</code>). </p>

<p>Since kubectl is much less heavily tested on windows than on Mac/Linux, you may need to pass the <code>--kubeconfig</code> argument if it isn't finding your configuration file in the default location (<code>gcloud container clusters get-credentials NAME</code> should write to <code>.kube/config</code> in your home directory and kubectl should read from the same file). </p>
