Downgrading Kubectl with Homebrew

I started seeing the following error when attempting to list pods with kubectl get pods -n production:

No resources found.
Error from server (NotAcceptable): unknown (get pods)

A quick search led me to a GitHub issue which explained that my version of kubectl was incompatible with the server.

The fix is to revert to an older version but I installed kubectl via Homebrew which only maintains a single version. What I didn’t know is that it’s possible to install a Homebrew package from a URL which makes downgrading easy.

First uninstall the newest version:

brew uninstall kubernetes-cli

Find a compatible version from the history of changes to the kubernetes-cli formula and install:

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/d09d97241b17a5e02a25fc51fc56e2a5de74501c/Formula/kubernetes-cli.rb

Now everything works again. You should probably pin the newly-installed old version so that it won’t get upgraded the next time you run brew upgrade:

brew pin kubernetes-cli