shpod

TL,DR: curl https://k8smastery.com/shpod.sh | sh

Thanks to @jpetazzo for this fantastic open source!

What's this?

shpod is a container image based on the Alpine distribution and includes a bunch of tools useful when working with containers, Docker, and Kubernetes.

It includes:

• ab (ApacheBench)
• bash
• crane
• curl
• Docker CLI
• Docker Compose
• envsubst
• git
• Helm
• jid
• jq
• kubectl
• kubectx + kubens
• kube-linter
• kube-ps1
• kubeseal
• kustomize
• ngrok
• popeye
• regctl
• ship
• skaffold
• skopeo
• SSH
• stern
• tilt
• tmux
• yq

It also includes completion for most of these tools.

Its goal is to provide a normalized environment, to go with the training materials at kubernetesmastery.com, so that you can get all the tools you need regardless of your exact Kubernetes setup.

To use it, you need a Kubernetes cluster. You can use Minikube, microk8s, Docker Desktop, AKS, EKS, GKE, or anything you like.

If it runs with a pseudo-terminal, it will spawn a shell, and you can attach to that shell. If it runs without a pseudo-terminal, it will start an SSH server, and you can connect to that SSH server to obtain the shell.

Using with a pseudo-terminal

Run it in a Pod and attach directly to it:

kubectl run shpod --restart=Never --rm -it --image=bretfisher/shpod

This should give you a shell in a pod, with all the tools installed. Most Kubernetes commands won't work (you will get permission errors) until you create an appropriate RoleBinding or ClusterRoleBinding (see below for details).

Using without a pseudo-terminal

Run as a Pod (or Deployment), then expose (or port-forward) to port 22 in that Pod, and connect with an SSH client:

kubectl run shpod --image=bretfisher/shpod
kubectl wait pod shpod --for=condition=ready
kubectl port-forward pod/shpod 2222:22
ssh -l k8s -p 2222 localhost # the default password is "k8s"

Note: you can change the password by setting the PASSWORD environment variable.

Granting permissions

By default, shpod uses the ServiceAccount of the Pod that it's running in; and by default (on most clusters) that ServiceAccount won't have much permissions, meaning that you will get errors like the following one:

$ kubectl get pods
Error from server (Forbidden): pods is forbidden: User "system:serviceaccount:default:default" cannot list resource "pods" in API group "" in the namespace "default"

If you want to use Kubernetes commands within shpod, you need to give permissions to that ServiceAccount.

Assuming that you are running shpod in the default namespace and with the default ServiceAccount, you can run the following command to give cluster-admin privileges (=all privileges) to the commands running in shpod:

kubectl create clusterrolebinding shpod \
        --clusterrole=shpod \
        --serviceaccount=default:default

You can also use the one-liner below.

One-liner usage

The shpod.sh script will:

• apply the shpod.yaml manifest to your cluster,
• wait for the pod shpod to be ready,
• attach to that pod,
• delete resources created by the manifest when you exit the pod.

The manifest will:

• create the shpod Namespace,
• create the shpod ServiceAccount in that Namespace,
• create the shpod ClusterRoleBinding giving cluster-admin privileges to that ServiceAccount,
• create a Pod named shpod, using that ServiceAccount, with a terminal (so that you can attach to that Pod and get a shell).

To execute it:

curl https://k8smastery.com/shpod.sh | sh

(Note: It used to be available at shpod.sh and shpod.me, but these became pretty expensive so I decided to drop them. If you were using them and want something fast to type, switch to shpod.in!)

If you don't like curl|sh, and/or if you want to execute things step by step, check the next section.

Step-by-step usage

1. Deploy the shpod pod:

   kubectl apply -f https://k8smastery.com/shpod.yaml

2. Attach to the shpod pod:

   kubectl attach --namespace=shpod -ti shpod

3. Enjoy!

Clean up

If you are using the shell script above, when you exit shpod, the script will delete the resources that were created.

If you want to delete the resources manually, you can use kubectl delete -f shpod.yaml, or delete the namespace shpod and the ClusterRoleBinding with the same name:

kubectl delete clusterrolebinding,ns shpod

Opening multiple sessions

Shpod tries to detect if it is already running; and if it's the case, it will try to start another process using kubectl exec. Note that if the first shpod process exits, Kubernetes will terminate all the other processes.

Special handling of kubeconfig

If you have a ConfigMap named kubeconfig in the Namespace where shpod is running, it will extract the first file from that ConfigMap and use it to populate ~/.kube/config.

This lets you inject a custom kubeconfig file into shpod.

Multi-arch support

Shpod supports both Intel and ARM 64 bits architectures. The Dockerfile in this repository should be able to support other architectures fairly easily. If a given tool isn't available on the target architecture, a dummy placeholder will be installed instead.