The port-forward command, Forwards one (or more) local ports to a pod.
This command is very useful for example in blue/green deployments where you would want to troubleshoot a misbehaving pod.
To take things even further, you could even execute some preliminary tests to the pods you feel could be more error-prone right inside your CI/CD pipeline in Jenkins by using multiple conditions, declarative pipeline.
Usage examples:
Listen on port 8888 locally, forwarding to 5000 in the pod
kubectl port-forward pod/mypod 8888:5000
Listen on port 8888 on all addresses, forwarding to 5000 in the pod
kubectl port-forward --address 0.0.0.0 pod/mypod 8888:5000
Listen on a random port locally, forwarding to 5000 in the pod
kubectl port-forward pod/mypod :5000
Listen on port 8888 on localhost and selected IP, forwarding to 5000 in the pod
kubectl port-forward --address localhost,10.19.21.23 pod/mypod 8888:5000
Listen on ports 5000 and 6000 locally, forwarding data to/from ports 5000 and 6000 in the pod
kubectl port-forward pod/mypod 5000 6000
Listen on ports 5000 and 6000 locally, forwarding data to/from ports 5000 and 6000 in a pod selected by the deployment
kubectl port-forward deployment/mydeployment 5000 6000
Listen on ports 5000 and 6000 locally, forwarding data to/from ports 5000 and 6000 in a pod selected by the service
kubectl port-forward service/myservice 5000 6000