I have lately been experimenting with Kubernetes and containers. As I was playing around with a few configurations I had the need for exploring a container’s contents interactively. Kubernetes’s dashboard has functionality to get into a container, but it assumes that you are using the bash shell. Unfortunately, any Apline Linux-based container images do not have bash installed so we have to resort to other options to get access.
Alpine uses the busybox provided ash shell (which basically a symbolic link to /bin/busybox). To get to the prompt you have to run.
kubectl exec <POD_NAME> /bin/ash -it