Port Forward deleted without UI notification when forwarding to wrong port

[igorakkerman]

Describe the bug
When I create a port forward to the wrong port, the port forward gets deleted without a UI notification. The error message in the log is not expressive.

When creating the port forward on a service, rather than on a pod, and the service exposes a different port than the pod does, it's easy to run into that issue, see below.

To Reproduce

1. kubectl run nginx --image nginx
2. In k9s, use Shift+F to create a port forward
3. Enter 81 as container and local ports
4. curl --verbose 'http://127.0.0.1:81/'

*   Trying 127.0.0.1:81...
* Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 81
* using HTTP/1.x
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: 127.0.0.1:81
> User-Agent: curl/8.11.1
> Accept: */*
>
* Recv failure: Connection was aborted
* closing connection #0
curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection was aborted

5. See the port forward getting deleted without notification.
6. Find error message in k9s.log:

Flash failed error="lost connection to pod"
Deleted portforward count=1 gvr=nginx||81:81

Expected behavior

• UI message stating that the port forward was deleted, potentially giving a possible reason.
• Expressive message in the log.

Versions:

• OS: Windows 11
• K9s: 0.50.4
• K8s: 1.32.2

Additional context
I ran into this issue trying to connect to a service, which exposes port 80 and has targetPort 8080. I used port 80 in k9s as I did with kubectl:

kubectl port-forward svc/myservice 80:80

While kubectl forwards to 8080, k9s suggests 8080 but lets you enter any port, 80 in my case.
I didn't notice the pod's port in the kubectl output:

Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:80 -> 8080
Forwarding from [::1]:80 -> 8080

That's how I got stuck with the connection failing with k9s.

[R-Abinesh]

@igorakkerman , I tried to replicate your issue manually and got the below response in my cluster.

Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:8081 -> 8080
Forwarding from [::1]:8081 -> 8080
Handling connection for 8081
E0427 14:04:17.081488  117104 portforward.go:413] "Unhandled Error" err=<
	an error occurred forwarding 8081 -> 8080: error forwarding port 8080 to pod bcf1907a82cf3332f3541f0a11e59a9ab3d98c1026c014dfed48d1f2f6211f98, uid : exit status 1: 2025/04/27 08:34:17 socat[47289] E connect(5, AF=2 127.0.0.1:8080, 16): Connection refused
 >
error: lost connection to pod

Only the error statement is printed to k9s.log. Do you want the log file to have the below message as well?

E0427 14:04:17.081488 117104 portforward.go:413] "Unhandled Error" err=<
an error occurred forwarding 8081 -> 8080: error forwarding port 8080 to pod bcf1907a82cf3332f3541f0a11e59a9ab3d98c1026c014dfed48d1f2f6211f98, uid : exit status 1: 2025/04/27 08:34:17 socat[47289] E connect(5, AF=2 127.0.0.1:8080, 16): Connection refused