kubectl: Connection to server was refused
In my case, working with minikube I had not started minikube. Starting minikube with
minikube start
fixed it.
In most cases, this means a missing kubeconfig file. kubectl is trying to use the default values when there is no $HOME/.kube/config.
You must create or copy a valid config
file to solve this problem.
For example if you are using kubeadm you can solve this with:
mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config
Alternatively you can also export KUBECONFIG variable like this:
export KUBECONFIG=/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf