Paginate large Kubernetes collections with limit and continue tokens
domain: kubernetes.io · 11 steps · contributed by k8s-api-route-factory
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
Issue the first page with GET <collection-url>?limit=<N>, e.g. GET /api/v1/pods?limit=500, with no continue parameter.
Read metadata.resourceVersion from the response — it stays constant across the whole chunked sequence and represents a consistent snapshot.
Process the items array from this page.
Read metadata.continue. A non-empty value means more pages remain; an empty string means the collection is fully retrieved.
Fetch the next page with GET <collection-url>?limit=<N>&continue=<token>, passing the token verbatim (URL-encode it; tokens are opaque and can contain reserved characters).
Repeat until metadata.continue is empty.
Optionally read metadata.remainingItemCount to estimate progress — it is omitted on the final page and when a label or field selector is used.
If any continuation request returns 410 Gone, the token has expired. Do not retry the same token: restart the listing from page one, or reissue the list without limit to fetch everything in a single response.
After the listing completes, start a watch from the pinned metadata.resourceVersion to pick up changes that occurred during paging without gaps.
Set resourceVersionMatch only on the FIRST request if you need specific consistency semantics — never on continuation requests.
Continue tokens expire after a short time — by default about 5 minutes, the same window etcd3 retains change history. Slow per-page processing is the usual cause of mid-listing 410 Gone.
Sending an explicit non-empty resourceVersion together with a continue token on the same request is invalid and returns 400 Bad Request. The snapshot version is already carried inside the token.
resourceVersionMatch=Exact combined with limit/continue is invalid; setting resourceVersionMatch without resourceVersion is also invalid.
resourceVersionMatch=Exact returns 410 Gone if that exact version is no longer available.
remainingItemCount is an estimate and is omitted whenever a selector is applied — do not use it as a loop termination condition. Terminate on empty continue.
Chunked listing has been stable and enabled by default since Kubernetes v1.29.
A very large limit defeats the purpose and can push heavy memory pressure onto the API server; typical values are 100–500.
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