kube-score

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Introduction

kube-score analyses Kubernetes object definitions and produces a list of recommendations to improve reliability and security. It reads YAML files or rendered Helm and Kustomize output and scores each object against a set of checks.

Checks cover common production pitfalls: missing CPU and memory requests and limits, missing readiness and liveness probes, containers running as root or with writable root filesystems, image tags set to latest, deployments without pod anti-affinity, services pointing at no pods, and missing PodDisruptionBudgets for replicated workloads. Each finding is marked as a warning or critical problem and can be ignored per object with annotations.

In the quality loop it is a best-practice gate that complements schema validation.

The source code is at zegl/kube-score on GitHub under the MIT licence, with about 3,100 stars; the most recent commit was on 20 May 2026.

Features

1. Reliability checks: Probes, resources, anti-affinity and disruption budgets.
2. Security checks: Root users, privilege and filesystem settings.
3. Severity levels: Warning and critical results.
4. Annotations: Skip specific checks per object.
5. Helm and Kustomize: Works on rendered output via stdin.
6. CI output: Human, CI and JSON formats.

Pros

1. Opinionated defaults: Encodes production experience out of the box.
2. Free to use: Open source under the MIT licence, so the core tool costs nothing to use.
3. Actively maintained: The repository had commits as recent as 20 May 2026.
4. Community: About 3,100 GitHub stars.

Cons

1. Infrequent releases: Recent releases have been spaced out.
2. Opinions may not fit: Some checks need disabling for special workloads.
3. Static only: Does not inspect live clusters.

Usage and Links (Example)

helm template ./chart | kube-score score - --output-format ci

Resources:

• kube-score website
• GitHub repository

Pricing

kube-score is free and open source under the MIT licence.

Recommended for?

1. Teams reviewing manifests before they reach production.
2. Platform teams teaching Kubernetes best practices.

Conclusion

kube-score is a practical checklist for Kubernetes manifests that catches common reliability gaps.

Use it alongside a schema validator and a policy engine.

On CheckOps, kube-score is filed under the Release & CI gates stage. Related tools listed here include KUTTL, Chainsaw, kind, helm-unittest, chart-testing and kubeconform. When comparing them, weigh the licence, the languages and platforms each supports, whether it is self-hosted or managed, and how cleanly it slots into your existing CI pipeline. Details on this page were checked against the official website, documentation and repository on 11 November 2026.