Getting Started
Disclaimer
This document collects information on how to go about debugging an openDesk deployment.
It will be extended over time as we deal with debugging cases.
We for sure do not want to reinvent the wheel, so we might link to external sources that contain helpful information where available.
Warning
You should never enable the debug option in production environments! By looking updebug.enabled
in the deployment, you will find the various places changes are applied when enabling debugging. So, outside of development and test environments, you should use them thoughtfully and carefully if needed.
Enable debugging
Check the openDesk debug.yaml.gotmpl
and configure it for your deployment
debug: enabled: true
This will result in:
- setting most component's log level to debug
- making the Keycloak admin console available by default at
https://id.<your_domain>/admin/
- ingress for
http://minio-console.<your_domain>
being configured
Note
When enabling debug mode and updating your deployment, you must manually delete all jobs before updating. In debug mode, we keep the jobs, and some job fields are immutable, leading to a deployment failure.
Note
All containers should write their log output to STDOUT; if you find (valuable) logs inside a container which were not in STDOUT, please let us know!
Adding containers to a pod for debugging purposes
During testing or development, you may need to execute tools, browse, or even change things in the filesystem of another container.
This can be a challenge the more security-hardened the container images are because there are no debugging tools available, and sometimes, there is not even a shell.
Adding a container to a Pod can ease the pain.
Below are some brief notes on debugging openDesk by adding debug containers. Of course, there are many more detailed resources out there.
Adding a container to a pod/deployment - Dev/Test only
You can add a container by editing and updating an existing deployment, which is quite comfortable with tools like Lens.
- Select the container you want to use as a debugging container; in the example below, it is
registry.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/components/platform-development/images/opendesk-debugging-image:latest
. - Ensure the
shareProcessNamespace
option is enabled for the Pod. - Reference the selected container within the
containers
array of the deployment. - If you want to access another container’s filesystem, ensure both containers’ user/group settings match.
- Save & update the deployment.
The following example can be used to debug the openDesk-Nextcloud-PHP
container; if you want to modify files, remember to set readOnlyRootFilesystem
to true
on the PHP container.
shareProcessNamespace: true containers: - name: debugging image: registry.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/components/platform-development/images/opendesk-debugging-image:latest command: ["/bin/bash", "-c", "while true; do echo 'This is a temporary container for debugging'; sleep 5 ; done"] securityContext: capabilities: drop: - ALL privileged: false runAsUser: 65532 runAsGroup: 65532 runAsNonRoot: true readOnlyRootFilesystem: false allowPrivilegeEscalation: false seccompProfile: type: RuntimeDefault
- After the deployment has been reloaded, open the shell of the debugging container.
- When you've succeeded, you will see the processes of both/all containers in the Pod when executing
ps aux
. - To access other containers’ filesystems, select the PID of a process from the other container and do a
cd /proc/<selected_process_id>/root
.
Temporary/ephemeral containers
An interesting read from which we picked most of the details below from: https://iximiuz.com/en/posts/kubernetes-ephemeral-containers/
Sometimes, you do not want to add a container permanently to your existing deployment. In that case, you could use ephemeral containers.
For the commands further down this section, we need to set some environment variables first:
NAMESPACE
: The namespace in which the Pod you want to inspect is running.DEPLOYMENT_NAME
: The deployment’s name responsible for spawning the Pod you want to inspect within the aforementioned namespace.POD_NAME
: The name of the Pod you want to inspect within the aforementioned namespace.EPH_CONTAINER_NAME
: The name of your debugging container, “debugging” seems obvious.DEBUG_IMAGE
: The image you want to use for debugging purposes.
e.g.
export NAMESPACE=my_test_deployment export DEPLOYMENT_NAME=opendesk-nextcloud-php export POD_NAME=opendesk-nextcloud-php-6686d47cfb-7642f export EPH_CONTAINER_NAME=debugging export DEBUG_IMAGE=registry.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/components/platform-development/images/opendesk-debugging-image:latest
You still need to ensure that your deployment supports process namespace sharing:
kubectl -n ${NAMESPACE} patch deployment ${DEPLOYMENT_NAME} --patch ' spec: template: spec: shareProcessNamespace: true'
Now, you can add the ephemeral container with:
kubectl -n ${NAMESPACE} debug -it --attach=false -c ${EPH_CONTAINER_NAME} --image={DEBUG_IMAGE} ${POD_NAME}
and open its interactive terminal with
kubectl -n ${NAMESPACE} attach -it -c ${EPH_CONTAINER_NAME} ${POD_NAME}
Components
Helmfile
When refactoring the Helmfile structure, you want to ensure that there are no unintended edits by executing e.g. diff
and
comparing the output of Helmfile from before and after the change by calling:
helmfile template -e dev >output_to_compare.yaml
MariaDB
When using the openDesk bundled MariaDB, you can explore the database(s) using the MariaDB interactive terminal from the Pod's command line: mariadb -u root -p
. On the password prompt, provide the value for MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD
which can be found in the Pod’s environment.
While you will find all the details for the CLI tool in the MariaDB documentation, some commonly used commands are:
help
: Get help on the psql command setshow databases
: Lists all databasesuse <databasename>
: Connect to<databasename>
show tables
: Lists tables within the currently connected databasequit
: Quit the client
Nextcloud
occ
is the CLI for Nextcloud; all the details can be found in the upstream documentation.
You can run occ commands in the opendesk-nextcloud-aio
pod like this: php /var/www/html/occ config:list
OpenProject
OpenProject is a Ruby on Rails application. Therefore, you can make use of the Rails console from the Pod’s command line bundle exec rails console
and run debug code like this:
uri = URI('https://nextcloud.url/apps/integration_openproject/check-config') Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port, :use_ssl => uri.scheme == 'https') do |http| request = Net::HTTP::Get.new uri response = http.request request # Net::HTTPResponse object end
PostgreSQL
Using the openDesk bundled PostgreSQL, you can explore database(s) using the PostgreSQL interactive terminal from the Pod's command line: psql -U postgres
.
While you will find all details about the cli tool psql
in the PostgreSQL documentation), some commonly used commands are:
\?
: Get help on the psql command set\l
: Lists all databases\c <databasename>
: Connect to<databasename>
\dt
: List (describe) tables within the currently connected database\q
: Quit the client
Keycloak
Setting the log level
Keycloak is the gateway to integrate other authentication management systems or applications. It is undesirable to enable debug mode for the whole platform if you just need to look into Keycloak.
Enabling debugging mode for Keycloak can easily be achieved in two steps:
- Updating the value for
KC_LOG_LEVEL
in the related configmapums-keycloak
.
export NAMESPACE=export CONFIGMAP_NAME=ums-keycloak kubectl patch -n ${NAMESPACE} configmap ${CONFIGMAP_NAME} --type merge -p '{"data":{"KC_LOG_LEVEL":"DEBUG"}}'
- Restart the Keycloak Pod(s).
Note
Because theums-keycloak-extensions-handler
is sending frequent requests (one per second) to Keycloak for retrieval of the Keycloak event history, you might want to stop/remove the deployment while debugging/analysing Keycloak to not get your debug output spammed by these requests.
Accessing the Keycloak admin console
Deployments set to debug.enable: true
expose the Keycloak admin console at http://id.<your_opendesk_domain>/admin/
. This can also be achieved by updating the Ingress ums-keycloak-extensions-proxy
with an additional path that allows access to /admin/
.
The admin console login is using the default Keycloak admin account kcadmin
and the password from the secret ums-opendesk-keycloak-credentials
.