DevOps

Kubernetes: Writing hostname to a file

Over the weekend I spent a bit of time playing around with Kubernetes and to get the hang of the technology I set myself the task of writing the hostname of the machine to a file.

I’m using the excellent minikube tool to create a local Kubernetes cluster for my experiments so the first step is to spin that up:

$ minikube start
Starting local Kubernetes cluster...
Kubectl is now configured to use the cluster.

The first thing I needed to work out how to get the hostname. I figured there was probably an environment variable that I could access. We can call the env command to see a list of all the environment variables in a container so I created a pod template that would show me that information:

hostname_super_simple.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: mark-super-simple-test-pod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: test-container
      image: gcr.io/google_containers/busybox:1.24
      command: [ "/bin/sh", "-c", "env" ]      
  dnsPolicy: Default
  restartPolicy: Never

I then created a pod from that template and checked the logs of that pod:

$ kubectl create -f hostname_super_simple.yaml 
pod "mark-super-simple-test-pod" created
$ kubectl logs  mark-super-simple-test-pod
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_PORT=443
KUBERNETES_PORT=tcp://10.0.0.1:443
HOSTNAME=mark-super-simple-test-pod
SHLVL=1
HOME=/root
KUBERNETES_PORT_443_TCP_ADDR=10.0.0.1
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
KUBERNETES_PORT_443_TCP_PORT=443
KUBERNETES_PORT_443_TCP_PROTO=tcp
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_PORT_HTTPS=443
KUBERNETES_PORT_443_TCP=tcp://10.0.0.1:443
PWD=/
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST=10.0.0.1

The information we need is in $HOSTNAME so the next thing we need to do is created a pod template which puts that into a file.

hostname_simple.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: mark-test-pod
spec:
  containers:
    - name: test-container
      image: gcr.io/google_containers/busybox:1.24
      command: [ "/bin/sh", "-c", "echo $HOSTNAME > /tmp/bar; cat /tmp/bar" ]
  dnsPolicy: Default
  restartPolicy: Never

We can create a pod using this template by running the following command:

$ kubectl create -f hostname_simple.yaml
pod "mark-test-pod" created

Now let’s check the logs of the instance to see whether our script worked:

$ kubectl logs mark-test-pod
mark-test-pod

Indeed it did, good times!

Reference: Kubernetes: Writing hostname to a file from our JCG partner Mark Needham at the Mark Needham Blog blog.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Back to top button