Deploying a Knative Service

Start here after installing Quickstart. Use the kn CLI throughout this tutorial; kubectl is used to inspect Kubernetes pods. Keep the same cluster and the default namespace for every lesson. There should not already be a Service named hello in that namespace.

You will deploy a "Hello world" Knative Service that accepts the environment variable TARGET and prints Hello ${TARGET}!.

Deploy the Service

kn service create hello \
  --image ghcr.io/knative/helloworld-go:latest \
  --port 8080 \
  --env TARGET=World

Expected result

kn reports that hello is available and prints its URL. On the kind Quickstart cluster, the URL resembles http://hello.default.127.0.0.1.sslip.io. Generated Revision names and addresses can vary; use the values from your output.

Send your first request

curl "$(kn service describe hello -o url)"

Expected output

Hello World!

You now have an HTTP endpoint managed by Knative Serving. The next lesson uses this same Service to observe scale-to-zero.

If the request fails to resolve the hostname, see the DNS check in Autoscaling. If the Service is not Ready, start with debugging application issues.

YAML equivalent (not needed for this route)

The Quickstart YAML examples show the same resource. Do not create it a second time; continue with kn for the remaining lessons.

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