Exec into the containers

If you want to examine the contents of a container “in place” using remote access to it, you can use the kubectl exec command. It allows you to run any command or just open an interactive shell session in the container. Of course, you can have shell access to the container only if container supports it and has a “Running” state.

In the following examples we will access the container pxc of the cluster1-pxc-0 Pod.

• Run date command:

  $ kubectl exec -ti cluster1-pxc-0 -c pxc -- date
  

  Expected output

  Thu Nov 24 10:01:17 UTC 2022
  

  You will see an error if the command is not present in a container. For example, trying to run the time command, which is not present in the container, by executing kubectl exec -ti cluster1-pxc-0 -c pxc -- time would show the following result:

  error: Internal error occurred: error executing command in container: failed to exec in container: failed to start exec "71bdb96a65af89d3672cd0d69a8f2c1068542a97b1938e7f6f17d29a87d76453": OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: unable to start container process: exec: "time": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown
  

• Print /var/log/mysqld.log file to a terminal:

  $ kubectl exec -ti cluster1-pxc-0 -c pxc -- cat /var/log/mysqld.log
  

• Similarly, opening an Interactive terminal, executing a pair of commands in the container, and exiting it may look as follows:

  $ kubectl exec -ti cluster1-pxc-0 -c pxc -- bash
  bash-4.4$ hostname
  cluster1-pxc-0
  bash-4.4$ ls /var/log/mysqld.log
  /var/log/mysqld.log
  bash-4.4$ exit
  exit
  $
  

Avoid the restart-on-fail loop for Percona XtraDB Cluster containers

The restart-on-fail loop takes place when the container entry point fails (e.g. mysqld crashes). In such a situation, Pod is continuously restarting. Continuous restarts prevent to get console access to the container, and so a special approach is needed to make fixes.

You can prevent such infinite boot loop by putting the Percona XtraDB Cluster containers into the infinity loop without starting mysqld. This behavior of the container entry point is triggered by the presence of the /var/lib/mysql/sleep-forever file.

For example, you can do it for the pxc container of an appropriate Percona XtraDB Cluster instance as follows:

$ kubectl exec -it cluster1-pxc-0 -c pxc -- sh -c 'touch /var/lib/mysql/sleep-forever'

If pxc container can’t start, you can use logs container instead:

$ kubectl exec -it cluster1-pxc-0 -c logs -- sh -c 'touch /var/lib/mysql/sleep-forever'

The instance will restart automatically and run in its usual way as soon as you remove this file (you can do it with a command similar to the one you have used to create the file, just substitute touch to rm in it).

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Last update: 2025-04-15