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 database of the cluster1-instance1-b5mr-0 Pod.

• Run date command:

  $ kubectl exec -ti cluster1-instance1-b5mr-0 -c database -- date
  

  Expected output

  Wed Jun 14 11:18:47 UTC 2023
  

  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-instance1-b5mr-0 -c database -- time would show the following result:

  OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: unable to start container process: exec: "time": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown command terminated with exit code 126
  

• Print log files to a terminal:

  $ kubectl exec -ti cluster1-instance1-b5mr-0 -c database -- cat /pgdata/pg16/log/postgresql-*.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-instance1-b5mr-0 -c database -- bash
  bash-4.4$ hostname
  cluster1-pxc-0
  bash-4.4$ ls /pgdata/pg16/log/
  postgresql-Wed.log
  bash-4.4$ exit
  exit
  $
  

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Last update: 2024-04-17