<p>I was successfully able to connect to the kubernetes cluster and work with the services and pods. At one point this changed and everytime I try to connect to the cluster I get the following error:</p>

<pre><code>PS C:\Users\xxx&gt; kubectl get pods
Unable to connect to the server: error parsing output for access token command "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Google\\Cloud SDK\\google-cloud-sdk\\bin\\gcloud.cmd config config-helper --format=json": yaml: line 4: could not find expected ':'
</code></pre>

<p>I am unsure of what the issue is. Google unfortunately doesn't yield any results for me either. </p>

<p>I have not changed any config files or anything. It was a matter of it working one second and not working the next. </p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

BURGERFLIPPER101
<p>It looks like the default auth plugin for GKE might be buggy on windows. kubectl is trying to run gcloud to get a token to authenticate to your cluster. If you run kubectl config view you can see the command it tried to run, and run it yourself to see if/why it fails.</p>

<p>As Alexandru said, a workaround is to use Google Application Default Credentials. Actually, gcloud container has built in support for doing this, which you can toggle by setting a property:</p>

<p><code>gcloud config set container/use_application_default_credentials true</code> Try running this or set environment variable</p>

<p><code>%CLOUDSDK_CONTAINER_USE_APPLICATION_DEFAULT_CREDENTIALS%</code> to true.</p>

<p>Referenced from <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/44660833/11317776">here</a></p>

<p>The workaround for this issue being:</p>

<p><code>gcloud container clusters get-credentials &lt;cluster-name&gt;</code> If you dont know your cluster name find it by <code>gcloud container clusters list</code> Finally, if those don't have issues, do <code>gcloud auth application-default login</code> and login with relative details</p>
