Debug Running Pods

Ideally, you should set up observability so that manual debugging is not needed.

Opta provides 2 helpful commands to help with debugging:

View logs

opta logs -c hello.yaml

This will show you logs from all the running container for this service.

SSH into an instance

opta shell -c hello.yaml

This will open up a shell into one of the running container.

Kubectl

Opta uses kubernetes under the hood, so we recommend using the standard kubernetes tool kubectl for most debugging use cases. This page will give you a brief tutorial on how to use this tool.

Install kubectl

On mac, you can install it via:

brew install kubectl

More detailed instructions are available on the offical site

Configure kubectl

Before you can use kubectl, you need to connect it to your kubernetes cluster (created by opta). This is pretty simple in the Opta world! Just run:

# configure the kubeconfig file
# note: if you don't want to use the default path $HOME/.kube/config, set the env var KUBECONFIG first
opta configure-kubectl

By defaut opta use the default kube config file ~/.kube/config, if you want to use a different file set the KUBECONFIG environment variable.

View pods

Kubernetes uses the word “pod” for containers[^1]. So every service will have one or more pods (as specified in your Opta yml as min_containers and max_containers).

You can see the pods for a given service by running:

kubectl get pods -n <service-name>

If this doesn’t show any pods, that means your service hasn’t been deployed. Check out the deployment docs to fix that.

Note that <service-name> is specified in your yaml file:

modules:
  - name: hello # service-name
    type: k8s-service
    image: docker.io/kennethreitz/httpbin:latest

Debug logging

Opta supports a verbose debug state wherein the log level is set to debug, and the auto-generated terraform files and directories are preserved after execution. This configuration serves for troubleshooting errors in deployment and preserving the full terraform infrastructure as code for the archives or other reasons. To enable this state, simply set the OPTA_DEBUG environment variables to some value like so:

export OPTA_DEBUG=1