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Attach Handlers to Container Lifecycle Events

This page shows how to attach handlers to Container lifecycle events. Kubernetes supports the postStart and preStop events. Kubernetes sends the postStart event immediately after a Container is started, and it sends the preStop event immediately before the Container is terminated.

Before you begin

You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using Minikube, or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:

To check the version, enter kubectl version.

Define postStart and preStop handlers

In this exercise, you create a Pod that has one Container. The Container has handlers for the postStart and preStop events.

Here is the configuration file for the Pod:

lifecycle-events.yaml 
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: lifecycle-demo
spec:
  containers:
  - name: lifecycle-demo-container
    image: nginx
    lifecycle:
      postStart:
        exec:
          command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "echo Hello from the postStart handler > /usr/share/message"]
      preStop:
        exec:
          command: ["/usr/sbin/nginx","-s","quit"]

In the configuration file, you can see that the postStart command writes a message file to the Container’s /usr/share directory. The preStop command shuts down nginx gracefully. This is helpful if the Container is being terminated because of a failure.

Create the Pod:

kubectl create -f https://k8s.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/lifecycle-events.yaml

Verify that the Container in the Pod is running:

kubectl get pod lifecycle-demo

Get a shell into the Container running in your Pod:

kubectl exec -it lifecycle-demo -- /bin/bash

In your shell, verify that the postStart handler created the message file:

root@lifecycle-demo:/# cat /usr/share/message

The output shows the text written by the postStart handler:

Hello from the postStart handler

Discussion

Kubernetes sends the postStart event immediately after the Container is created. There is no guarantee, however, that the postStart handler is called before the Container’s entrypoint is called. The postStart handler runs asynchronously relative to the Container’s code, but Kubernetes’ management of the container blocks until the postStart handler completes. The Container’s status is not set to RUNNING until the postStart handler completes.

Kubernetes sends the preStop event immediately before the Container is terminated. Kubernetes’ management of the Container blocks until the preStop handler completes, unless the Pod’s grace period expires. For more details, see Termination of Pods.

Note: Kubernetes only sends the preStop event when a Pod is terminated. This means that the preStop hook is not invoked when the Pod is completed. This limitation is tracked in issue #55087.

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