Restart container within pod

9/8/2017

I have a pod test-1495806908-xn5jn with 2 containers. I'd like to restart one of them called container-test. Is it possible to restart a single container within a pod and how? If not, how do I restart the pod?

The pod was created using a deployment.yaml with:

kubectl create -f deployment.yaml
-- s5s
kubectl
kubernetes

9 Answers

9/9/2017

Is it possible to restart a single container

Not through kubectl, although depending on the setup of your cluster you can "cheat" and docker kill the-sha-goes-here, which will cause kubelet to restart the "failed" container (assuming, of course, the restart policy for the Pod says that is what it should do)

how do I restart the pod

That depends on how the Pod was created, but based on the Pod name you provided, it appears to be under the oversight of a ReplicaSet, so you can just kubectl delete pod test-1495806908-xn5jn and kubernetes will create a new one in its place (the new Pod will have a different name, so do not expect kubectl get pods to return test-1495806908-xn5jn ever again)

-- mdaniel
Source: StackOverflow

12/13/2017

There are cases when you want to restart a specific container instead of deleting the pod and letting Kubernetes recreate it.

Doing a kubectl exec POD_NAME -c CONTAINER_NAME /sbin/killall5 worked for me.

(I changed the command from reboot to /sbin/killall5 based on the below recommendations.)

-- Zsolt Katona
Source: StackOverflow

12/29/2018

Both pod and container are ephemeral, try to use the following command to stop the specific container and the k8s cluster will restart a new container.

kubectl exec -it [POD_NAME] -c [CONTAINER_NAME] -- /bin/sh -c "kill 1"

This will send a SIGTERM signal to process 1, which is the main process running in the container. All other processes will be children of process 1, and will be terminated after process 1 exits. See the kill manpage for other signals you can send.

-- ROY
Source: StackOverflow

9/10/2017

The whole reason for having kubernetes is so it manages the containers for you so you don't have to care so much about the lifecyle of the containers in the pod.

Since you have a deployment setup that uses replica set. You can delete the pod using kubectl delete pod test-1495806908-xn5jn and kubernetes will manage the creation of a new pod with the 2 containers without any downtime. Trying to manually restart single containers in pods negates the whole benefits of kubernetes.

-- Innocent Anigbo
Source: StackOverflow

5/29/2019

All the above answers have mentioned deleting the pod...but if you have many pods of the same service then it would be tedious to delete each one of them...

Therefore, I propose the following solution, restart:

  • 1) Set scale to zero :

     kubectl scale deployment <<name>> --replicas=0 -n service 

    The above command will terminate all your pods with the name <<name>>

  • 2) To start the pod again, set the replicas to more than 0

    kubectl scale deployment <<name>> --replicas=2 -n service

    The above command will start your pods again with 2 replicas.

-- Ajay Reddy
Source: StackOverflow

7/26/2018

We use a pretty convenient command line to force re-deployment of fresh images on integration pod.
We noticed that our alpine containers all run their "sustaining" command on PID 5. Therefore, sending it a SIGTERM signal takes the container down. imagePullPolicy being set to Always has the kubelet re-pull the latest image when it brings the container back.

kubectl exec -i [pod name] -c [container-name] -- kill -15 5
-- Alexis LEGROS
Source: StackOverflow

4/1/2019

There was an issue in coredns pod, I deleted such pod by

kubectl delete pod -n=kube-system coredns-fb8b8dccf-8ggcf

Its pod will restart automatically.

-- j3ffyang
Source: StackOverflow

12/4/2018

Killing the process specified in the Dockerfile's CMD / ENTRYPOINT works for me. (The container restarts automatically)

Rebooting was not allowed in my container, so I had to use this workaround.

-- Kevin
Source: StackOverflow

9/17/2019
kubectl exec -it POD_NAME -c CONTAINER_NAME bash - then kill 1

Assuming the container is run as root which is not recommended.

In my case when I changed the application config, I had to reboot the container which was used in a sidecar pattern, I would kill the PID for the spring boot application which is owned by the docker user.

-- GreenThumb
Source: StackOverflow