Kubernetes liveness probe – Command Exec

Liveness Probe Command Exec is an element in Kubernetes, thanks to which you can control the state of life of a counter in Pods using command inside containers. This option allows us to check, for example, the content of files, the existence of files and other options (available from the command level) that can give us information about the correct work of our container.

In this article, I will show you an example of using Kubernetes Liveness Probe Command Exec and available options.

Command Exec settings

Liveness Probe restarts the container when the command returns a failure code. This feature also has some useful settings such as: 

1. initialDelaySeconds – time after which Liveness Probe should start polling the endpoint 
2. periodSeconds – the frequency of polling the endpoint 
3. timeoutSeconds – time after which the timeout will expire. 
4. successThreshold – the minimum number of successful attempts after which the probe will determine the correct operation of the container 
5. failureThreshold – number of failed attempts after which the container will restart 

exec options: 

1. command – list of commands (depend on image distribution) to do by liveness probe

# YAML example
# liveness-pod-example.yaml
#
apiVersion: v1 
kind: Pod 
metadata: 
  name: liveness-command-exec 
spec: 
  containers: 
  - name: liveness 
    image: nginx 
    ports: 
        - containerPort: 80 
    livenessProbe: 
      exec:
        command:
        - cat
        - /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html
      initialDelaySeconds: 2 #Default 0 
      periodSeconds: 2 #Default 10 
      timeoutSeconds: 1 #Default 1 
      successThreshold: 1 #Default 1 
      failureThreshold: 3 #Default 3

Liveness Probe – example

Create pod:

kubectl create -f liveness-pod-example.yaml

Describe the pod:

kubectl describe pod liveness-command-exec  

Restart Count:  0
.
.
.
Events:
  Type     Reason     Age              From                          Message
  ----     ------     ----             ----                          -------
  Normal   Scheduled  <unknown>        default-scheduler             Successfully assigned jenkins/liveness-command-exec to dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2
  Normal   Pulling    100s             kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Pulling image "nginx"
  Normal   Pulled     97s              kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Successfully pulled image "nginx"
  Normal   Created    97s              kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Created container liveness
  Normal   Started    97s              kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Started container liveness
  Warning  Unhealthy  2s (x2 over 4s)  kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Liveness probe failed: cat: /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html: No such file or directory

Pod works great, no issue count.

To check if the probe works, remove index.html file from “liveness-command-exec” pod.

kubectl exec -it liveness-command-exec -- rm /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html 

kubectl describe pod liveness-command-exec

Restart Count: 1
.
.
.
Events:
  Type     Reason     Age                From                          Message
  ----     ------     ----               ----                          -------
  Normal   Scheduled  <unknown>          default-scheduler             Successfully assigned jenkins/liveness-command-exec to dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2
  Warning  Unhealthy  5s (x3 over 9s)    kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Liveness probe failed: cat: /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html: No such file or directory
  Normal   Killing    5s                 kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Container liveness failed liveness probe, will be restarted
  Normal   Pulling    4s (x2 over 105s)  kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Pulling image "nginx"
  Normal   Pulled     2s (x2 over 102s)  kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Successfully pulled image "nginx"
  Normal   Created    2s (x2 over 102s)  kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Created container liveness
  Normal   Started    2s (x2 over 102s)  kubelet, dcpoz-d-sou-k8swor2  Started container liveness

Curious to see what else you can test with Kubernetes probes? Check this HTTPRequest config.