CKA Tips - 002 Using kubectl explain
What would you do when you don’t know what is the structure of any Kubernetes resource, what is the specification, types of attributes, etc, most of us probably reach for Google. But there’s a better way! kubectl explain is used to discover static information about Kubernetes Resources. kubectl explain command as it seems a good starting point to understand and know the static information for. In this post lets see how kubectl explain works
Here it is
$ kubectl explain pod
KIND: Pod
VERSION: v1
DESCRIPTION:
Pod is a collection of containers that can run on a host. This resource is
created by clients and scheduled onto hosts.
FIELDS:
apiVersion <string>
APIVersion defines the versioned schema of this representation of an
object. Servers should convert recognized schemas to the latest internal
value, and may reject unrecognized values. More info:
https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#resources
kind <string>
Kind is a string value representing the REST resource this object
represents. Servers may infer this from the endpoint the client submits
requests to. Cannot be updated. In CamelCase. More info:
https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#types-kinds
metadata <Object>
Standard object's metadata. More info:
https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#metadata
spec <Object>
Specification of the desired behavior of the pod. More info:
https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#spec-and-status
status <Object>
Most recently observed status of the pod. This data may not be up to date.
Populated by the system. Read-only. More info:
https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#spec-and-status
Behind the scenes, kubectl just made an API request to my Kubernetes cluster, grabbed the current Swagger documentation of the API version running in the cluster, and output the documentation and object types.
what if I want to see all the fields in a Pod?
$ kubectl explain pod --recursive
KIND: Pod
VERSION: v1
DESCRIPTION:
Pod is a collection of containers that can run on a host. This resource is
created by clients and scheduled onto hosts.
FIELDS:
apiVersion <string>
kind <string>
metadata <Object>
annotations <map[string]string>
clusterName <string>
creationTimestamp <string>
deletionGracePeriodSeconds <integer>
deletionTimestamp <string>
finalizers <[]string>
generateName <string>
generation <integer>
labels <map[string]string>
managedFields <[]Object>
apiVersion <string>
fieldsType <string>
fieldsV1 <map[string]>
manager <string>
operation <string>
time <string>
name <string>
namespace <string>
...
Truncated the looong output and how would get more details about specifics
$ kubectl explain pod.spec.containers
KIND: Pod
VERSION: v1
RESOURCE: containers <[]Object>
DESCRIPTION:
List of containers belonging to the pod. Containers cannot currently be
added or removed. There must be at least one container in a Pod. Cannot be
updated.
A single application container that you want to run within a pod.
FIELDS:
args <[]string>
Arguments to the entrypoint. The docker image's CMD is used if this is not
provided. Variable references $(VAR_NAME) are expanded using the
container's environment. If a variable cannot be resolved, the reference in
the input string will be unchanged. The $(VAR_NAME) syntax can be escaped
with a double $$, ie: $$(VAR_NAME). Escaped references will never be
expanded, regardless of whether the variable exists or not. Cannot be
updated. More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/inject-data-application/define-command-argument-container/#running-a-command-in-a-shell
command <[]string>
Entrypoint array. Not executed within a shell. The docker image's
ENTRYPOINT is used if this is not provided. Variable references $(VAR_NAME)
are expanded using the container's environment. If a variable cannot be
resolved, the reference in the input string will be unchanged. The
$(VAR_NAME) syntax can be escaped with a double $$, ie: $$(VAR_NAME).
Escaped references will never be expanded, regardless of whether the
variable exists or not. Cannot be updated. More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/inject-data-application/define-command-argument-container/#running-a-command-in-a-shell
env <[]Object>
List of environment variables to set in the container. Cannot be updated.
envFrom <[]Object>
List of sources to populate environment variables in the container. The
keys defined within a source must be a C_IDENTIFIER. All invalid keys will
be reported as an event when the container is starting. When a key exists
in multiple sources, the value associated with the last source will take
precedence. Values defined by an Env with a duplicate key will take
precedence. Cannot be updated.
image <string>
Docker image name. More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/containers/images This field is
optional to allow higher level config management to default or override
container images in workload controllers like Deployments and StatefulSets.
imagePullPolicy <string>
Image pull policy. One of Always, Never, IfNotPresent. Defaults to Always
if :latest tag is specified, or IfNotPresent otherwise. Cannot be updated.
More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/containers/images#updating-images
lifecycle <Object>
Actions that the management system should take in response to container
lifecycle events. Cannot be updated.
livenessProbe <Object>
Periodic probe of container liveness. Container will be restarted if the
probe fails. Cannot be updated. More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod-lifecycle#container-probes
name <string> -required-
Name of the container specified as a DNS_LABEL. Each container in a pod
must have a unique name (DNS_LABEL). Cannot be updated.
ports <[]Object>
List of ports to expose from the container. Exposing a port here gives the
system additional information about the network connections a container
uses, but is primarily informational. Not specifying a port here DOES NOT
prevent that port from being exposed. Any port which is listening on the
default "0.0.0.0" address inside a container will be accessible from the
network. Cannot be updated.
readinessProbe <Object>
Periodic probe of container service readiness. Container will be removed
from service endpoints if the probe fails. Cannot be updated. More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod-lifecycle#container-probes
resources <Object>
Compute Resources required by this container. Cannot be updated. More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/manage-compute-resources-container/
securityContext <Object>
Security options the pod should run with. More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/policy/security-context/ More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/security-context/
startupProbe <Object>
StartupProbe indicates that the Pod has successfully initialized. If
specified, no other probes are executed until this completes successfully.
If this probe fails, the Pod will be restarted, just as if the
livenessProbe failed. This can be used to provide different probe
parameters at the beginning of a Pod's lifecycle, when it might take a long
time to load data or warm a cache, than during steady-state operation. This
cannot be updated. This is a beta feature enabled by the StartupProbe
feature flag. More info:
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod-lifecycle#container-probes
stdin <boolean>
Whether this container should allocate a buffer for stdin in the container
runtime. If this is not set, reads from stdin in the container will always
result in EOF. Default is false.
stdinOnce <boolean>
Whether the container runtime should close the stdin channel after it has
been opened by a single attach. When stdin is true the stdin stream will
remain open across multiple attach sessions. If stdinOnce is set to true,
stdin is opened on container start, is empty until the first client
attaches to stdin, and then remains open and accepts data until the client
disconnects, at which time stdin is closed and remains closed until the
container is restarted. If this flag is false, a container processes that
reads from stdin will never receive an EOF. Default is false
terminationMessagePath <string>
Optional: Path at which the file to which the container's termination
message will be written is mounted into the container's filesystem. Message
written is intended to be brief final status, such as an assertion failure
message. Will be truncated by the node if greater than 4096 bytes. The
total message length across all containers will be limited to 12kb.
Defaults to /dev/termination-log. Cannot be updated.
terminationMessagePolicy <string>
Indicate how the termination message should be populated. File will use the
contents of terminationMessagePath to populate the container status message
on both success and failure. FallbackToLogsOnError will use the last chunk
of container log output if the termination message file is empty and the
container exited with an error. The log output is limited to 2048 bytes or
80 lines, whichever is smaller. Defaults to File. Cannot be updated.
tty <boolean>
Whether this container should allocate a TTY for itself, also requires
'stdin' to be true. Default is false.
volumeDevices <[]Object>
volumeDevices is the list of block devices to be used by the container.
volumeMounts <[]Object>
Pod volumes to mount into the container's filesystem. Cannot be updated.
workingDir <string>
Container's working directory. If not specified, the container runtime's
default will be used, which might be configured in the container image.
Cannot be updated.
So whenever in exam like CKA/CKAD, though you have access to Kubernetes Documentation but if you are not sure about what spec a particular resource has or what fields it has you can use kubectl explain, it is the much faster than searching through docs.