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
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