Chapter 11. Opening a Remote Shell to Containers

The oc rsh command allows you to locally access and manage tools that are on the system. The secure shell (SSH) is the underlying technology and industry standard that provides a secure connection to the application. Access to applications with the shell environment is protected and restricted with Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) policies.

Open a remote shell session to a container:

$ oc rsh <pod>

While in the remote shell, you can issue commands as if you are inside the container and perform local operations like monitoring, debugging, and using CLI commands specific to what is running in the container.

For example, in a MySQL container, you can count the number of records in the database by invoking the mysql command, then using the the prompt to type in the SELECT command. You can also use use commands like ps(1) and ls(1) for validation.

BuildConfigs and DeployConfigs map out how you want things to look and pods (with containers inside) are created and dismantled as needed. Your changes are not persistent. If you make changes directly within the container and that container is destroyed and rebuilt, your changes will no longer exist.

For help with usage, options, and to see examples:

$ oc rsh -h