I was trying to get into kubernetes-dashboard Pod, but I keep getting this error:
C:\Users\USER>kubectl exec -n kubernetes-dashboard kubernetes-dashboard-66c887f759-bljtc -it -- sh
OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: unable to start container process: exec: "sh": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown
command terminated with exit code 126
The Pod is running normally and I can access the Kubernetes UI via the browser. But I was getting some issues getting it running before, and I wanted to get inside the pod to run some commands, but I always get the same error mentioned above.
When I try the same command with a pod running nginx for example, it works:
C:\Users\USER>kubectl exec my-nginx -it -- sh
/ # ls
bin home proc sys
dev lib root tmp
docker-entrypoint.d media run usr
docker-entrypoint.sh mnt sbin var
etc opt srv
/ # exit
Any explanation, please?
That error message means literally what it says: there is no sh or any other shell in the container. There's no particular requirement that a container have a shell, and if a Docker image is built FROM scratch (as the Kubernetes dashboard image is) or a "distroless" image, it just may not contain one.
In most cases you shouldn't need to "enter a container", and you should use kubectl exec (or docker exec) sparingly if at all. This is doubly true in Kubernetes: it's not just that changes you make manually will get lost when the container exits, but also that in Kubernetes you typically have multiple replicas that you can't manually edit all at once, and also that in some cases the cluster can delete and recreate a Pod outside of your control.