Premise
I often find myself needing to debug some network issue on Kubernetes. This is usually something like doing a traceroute to an external or internal address, checking egress IP addresses, or just needing a shell on the Kubernetes cluster.
The Past
What I used to do is find any running pod on the cluster and shell into it, hoping it’s running some sort of base Alpine/Debian image. Then I’d use whatever the built-in package manager is (apt, yum, etc) to install my the tools (nmap, traceroute, ping, etc).
And I would have to do this every time.
Every. Damn. Time.
The Future
So I decided to build my own debug Docker image, which would serve as my Swiss-Army Knife for debugging thing.
I’ve called it Debuggery and you can clone it here. It uses an Alpine base image to keep the size as lean as possible.
The usage is simple but very convenient. Just set up an alias:
alias kdebug='kubectl exec -it debuggery -- zsh || kubectl run --rm -it debuggery --image=rameezk/debuggery --restart=Never'
Basically, if the debuggery pod is already running it will open a shell on it (zsh of course 🚀), otherwise, it will spin up a new pod.
That’s it. Forks and PR’s welcome 😊.
Peace ✌🏽