tdeutsch/debugcontainer repository overview

⁠debugcontainer

Swiss army knife for debugging containers and Kubernetes: one Alpine image with networking, storage, performance and cluster tools. Start it where you need to test or debug something.

⁠Usage

# Kubernetes: throwaway pod with a shell
kubectl run debug --rm -it --image=ghcr.io/tuxpeople/debugcontainer:latest -- bash

# Attach to a running pod (shares its network namespace)
kubectl debug -it <pod> --image=ghcr.io/tuxpeople/debugcontainer:latest -- bash

# Docker
docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/tuxpeople/debugcontainer:latest bash

Without a command the container just sleeps (sleep infinity), so you can kubectl exec into it.

⁠Included tools

Versions of the downloaded tools: cat /etc/*-version.

⁠Image

• Alpine 3.24, amd64 and arm64
• Runs as root on purpose, the network and disk tools need it. For everything else use --user 1000 / runAsUser: 1000 (user abc).
• Downloaded binaries (flux, ytt, imgpkg, oras) are verified against the checksums of their releases; Renovate keeps them current
• Also on Docker Hub as tdeutsch/debugcontainer
• Build versioning (Conventional Commits), continuing after 3.6.0
• Tags: X.Y.Z, X.Y, X, latest

⁠History

Built in tuxpeople/docker-debugcontainer⁠ until 2026-11 (tags vX.Y.Z; latest stayed at 3.6.0 from 2025-10 while only nightly was rebuilt). Changes in 4.0.0:

• latest and the version tags get every update again
• Removed odo (discontinued by Red Hat) and oc (the amd64 build needs glibc and never ran on Alpine); kubectl now comes from Alpine, it did not run on amd64 before either
• Downloads verified with checksums, azure-cli built in a separate stage (no compilers in the image)
• The nightly, devel and edge tags are no longer updated; use latest or a version tag