I was thinking about easy copying files to/from OpenShift pods and thought it would be awesome if I can make `rsync` use `oc exec` instead of ssh to perform that. This should not be a common use case as pods should generally be stateless but one may want to backup data from a persistent volume for example when environment is not in control the pod owner's control.
You may already know that ssh access is not available to OpenShift/Kubernates managed pods but at least in openshift one can use the client tool to access them in a ssh-like fashion. That's done using the `oc rsh` and `oc exec` sub-commands.
In fact `oc rsh` only wraps `oc exec` by adding it's options `-i` to pass stdin to remote process as well `-t` for terminal. For rsync we only need `-i` though. Here's the magic incantation:
$ rsync -av -e 'oc exec -n fs1d4 -i myapp-1-vytqm' -- /tmp/ec2-user/ --:haha/ sending incremental file list created directory haha ./ gagag brewer/ sent 142 bytes received 38 bytes 72.00 bytes/sec total size is 4 speedup is 0.02
Let me dissect that for you. First we use the `-a` option of rsync because I want recursive sync keeping all file properties, as well `-v` to see what actually happened. You can add and mix any other `rsync` options here like `--delete`, `--exclude`, etc.
Then we specify the rsh command and that is 'oc exec -n fs1d4 -i myapp-1-vytqm' where `fs1d4` is your project name and `myapp-1-vytqm` is the desired pod name. You can use any other `oc` option here like `--config`, `--container`, etc. The important points are:
- keep the `-i` option so that rsync can talk to remote process
- do not include the `--` option terminator so that rsync can later add it
After that we use the `--` option terminator to tell rsync threat any further command parameters as path location specifiers and not options. This is important because our hack forces us to use `--` as a hostname in SRC or DST location specifier. More on that later.
Our SRC location specifier is `/tmp/ec2-user/` and that is a local test directory. The DST location specifier is `--:haha/` which means relative path `haha/` on host `--`. The reason is that if we only specify "haha/", then rsync will consider that location local and will not invoke the remote shell. So we need to specify some hostname. But whatever we specify, it will break our `oc exec` command. So I figured, I can specify `--` for the hostname and rsync will just append to the remote shell command. And in fact we need `--` appended, otherwise the remote call to `rsync` will fail.
You may already know that local `rsync` calls `rsync` on the remote end and then the two processes communicate over stdin/stdout. To avoid `oc exec` interpret options of the remote `rsync` invocation, we need that `--` as a hostname`. And to avoid `--:haha/` being interpreted as an option to local `rsync` invocation, we need the first `--` above.
I doubt my ability to explain but hopefully gave you some pointers how to make it work. Here are a few other important points:
- make sure your pod has `rsync` already installed and pointed to in the pod PATH variable. Or use `--rsync-path` option.
- make sure you have write access to destination dir
- make sure you're already logged into OpenShift (oc login)
- make sure to write correct commands as mistakes usually produce hardly informative output (`strace -f` helps to debug)
Hope that helps somebody.
