Kubectl command to list pods of a deployment in Kubernetes

Question

Is there a way to use kubectl to list only the pods belonging to a deployment? Currently, I do this to get pods:

kubectl get pods| grep hello

But it seems an overkill to get ALL the pods when I am interested to know only the pods for a given deployment. I use the output of this command to see the status of all pods, and then possibly exec into one of them.

I also tried kc get -o wide deployments hellodeployment, but it does not print the Pod names.

score 73 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 31 '22 at 13:29

73

There's a label in the pod for the selector in the deployment. That's how a deployment manages its pods. For example for the label or selector app=http-svc you can do something like that this and avoid using grep and listing all the pods (this becomes useful as your number of pods becomes very large)

here are some examples command line:

# single label
kubectl get pods -l=app=http-svc
kubectl get pods --selector=app=http-svc
# multiple labels
kubectl get pods --selector key1=value1,key2=value2

edited Aug 31 '22 at 13:29

Trevor Boyd Smith

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answered Oct 23 '18 at 20:43

Rico

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1

But there are 2 labels for the pods: run=http-svc and pod-template-hash=736954933. If you specify just one label, there is a chance that you include some other pods that are not managed by the deployment. – kekaoyunfuwu Feb 23 '21 at 15:36

score 12 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 23 '21 at 16:10

K8s components are linked to each other by labels and selectors. There are just no built-in attributes of My-List-of-ReplicaSets or My-List-Of-Pods for a deployment. You can't get them from kubectl describe or kubectl get

As @Rico suggested above, you have to use label filters. But you can't simply use the labels that you specify in the deployment metafile because deployment will generate a random hash and use it as an additional label.

For example, I have a deployment and a standalone pod that share the same label app=http-svc. While the first two are managed by the deployment, the 3rd one is not and shouldn't be in the result.


ma.chi@~/k8s/deployments % kubectl get pods --show-labels
NAME                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   LABELS
http-9c89b5578-6cqbp   1/1     Running   0          7s    app=http-svc,pod-template-hash=574561134
http-9c89b5578-vwqbx   1/1     Running   0          7s    app=http-svc,pod-template-hash=574561134
nginx-standalone       1/1     Running   0          7s    app=http-svc
ma.chi@~/k8s/deployments %

The source file is

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: http-svc
  name: http
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: http-svc
  strategy: {}
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: http-svc
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: nginx:1.9.1
        name: nginx1

---

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  labels:
    app: http-svc
  name: nginx-standalone
spec:
  containers:
  - image: nginx:1.9.1
    name: nginx1-standalone

To exact spot the containers created and managed by your deployment, you can use the script below(which is ugly, but this is the best I can do)

DEPLOY_NAME=http
RS_NAME=`kubectl describe deployment $DEPLOY_NAME|grep "^NewReplicaSet"|awk '{print $2}'`; echo $RS_NAME

POD_HASH_LABEL=`kubectl get rs $RS_NAME -o jsonpath="{.metadata.labels.pod-template-hash}"` ; echo $POD_HASH_LABEL

POD_NAMES=`kubectl get pods -l pod-template-hash=$POD_HASH_LABEL --show-labels | tail -n +2 | awk '{print $1}'`; echo $POD_NAMES

score 5 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 04 '23 at 19:07

Here's a tidier shell alias (based on this code by @kekaoyunfuwu) that only lists the pods of a deployment (no interim results are shown):

k_list_pods_in_deployment() (
  test $# -eq 0 && {
    echo "Missing deployment name" && kubectl get deployments
    return 1
  }
  deployment="$1"; shift
  replicaSet="$(kubectl describe deployment $deployment \
    | grep '^NewReplicaSet' \
    | awk '{print $2}'
  )"

  podHashLabel="$(kubectl get rs $replicaSet \
    -o jsonpath='{.metadata.labels.pod-template-hash}'
  )"

  kubectl get pods -l pod-template-hash=$podHashLabel --show-labels \
    | tail -n +2 | awk '{print $1}'

)
alias k.list-pods-in-deployment=k_list_pods_in_deployment

Kubectl command to list pods of a deployment in Kubernetes

3 Answers3

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