Note: This blog post is a very old and is preserved here for reference. There are probably better ways to do this today!
In those cases where you need a throw-away interactive shell within your cluster:
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:
Once you are done with your tinkering:
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.