Greg Taylor

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Fire up an interactive bash Pod within a Kubernetes cluster

In those cases where you need a throw-away interactive shell within your cluster:

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You may, of course, use a different image or shell. Some of the arguments explained:

  • my-shell: This ends up being the name of the Deployment that is created. Your pod name will typically be this plus a unique hash or ID at the end.
  • --rm: Delete any resources we've created once we detach. When you exit out of your session, this cleans up the Deployment and Pod.
  • -i/--tty: The combination of these two are what allows us to attach to an interactive session. 
  • --: Delimits the end of the kubectl run options from the positional arg (bash).
  • bash: Overrides the container's CMD. In this case, we want to launch bash as our container's command.

Note that you'll need to update your apt cache before you can install packages:

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Once you are done with your tinkering:

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Post-exit, the Deployment and Pod that kubectl created will both be stopped and deleted, taking with it our container and anything we did within it.