Tekton Debugging: How to List Files in a Task

In Tekton, your Tasks run in short-lived containers. You join Tasks together into a CI/CD pipeline. Running tasks in containers is all rather nice and “cloud-native”, but how are you meant to debug them?

A Task in Tekton runs in a container. It’s a good use for containers because the container pops up, executes commands in an isolated environment, and then disappears quickly.

But what if you want to run any sort of debug command, to see what files were created or used by your Tasks? Then you can add debug commands into your Pipeline.

Find out what’s inside the box

When a Pipeline doesn’t seem to be working, one of the first things I try to do is find out what’s inside the container. (To see how the magic trick works, you’ve got to look inside the box, right?)

You can add custom commands into a Task to aid with debugging

Normally in a Linux terminal you would use a command like find or ls for this.

In Tekton, you don’t get a terminal. But you can add extra steps to a Task, to run commands.

So you can add the find or ls command as another step to the beginning or the end of a Task that you refer to in your Pipeline.

Here’s one example of this. Using the alpine Docker image to run a shell (sh) and run the find command:

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Task
...
steps:
  # Add an extra step to list the contents of /workspace
  # You might add this before or after another Task
  - name: dump-directory
    image: alpine
    command:
      - /bin/sh
    args:
      - '-c'
      - |
        set -ex
        find /workspace
    resources: {}

This step becomes useful when you look at the logs from your pipeline run.

To see the logs

I added the task above, and then I ran my Pipeline. Notice a new TaskRun:

$ kubectl get taskruns
NAME                                             SUCCEEDED   REASON                    STARTTIME   COMPLETIONTIME
hello-java-jlt4t-compile-and-build-image-qhk2j   False       Failed                    20s         8s
hello-java-jlt4t-fetch-repository-fdkjc          True        Succeeded                 29s         20s

Then I get the logs for the TaskRun. It’s the TaskRun with a status of Failed:

$ kubectl logs $(kubectl get taskrun hello-java-jlt4t-compile-and-build-image-qhk2j -ojsonpath={.status.podName}) \
    --all-containers

And I see this in the logs:

+ find /workspace
/workspace
/workspace/source
/workspace/source/hello-java-sigstore
/workspace/.cache
/workspace/.m2
/workspace/.docker
/workspace/.docker/config.json

That’s the output from the find command. It might not be obvious to you, but those directories are empty! I was expecting my code to be in that workspace directory. So I’ve clearly got some bug-fixing to do. 😪

But at least now I’m armed with information which will help me debug the problem.

And so the cloud-native journey continues….

Tom Donohue

By Tom Donohue, Editor | Twitter | LinkedIn

Tom is the founder of Tutorial Works. He’s an engineer and open source advocate. He uses the blog as a vehicle for sharing tutorials, writing about technology and talking about himself in the third person. His very first computer was an Acorn Electron.

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