Accessing the Kubernetes API from an Elixir container

If you want to access the Kubernetes API from Elixir, you should probably just use the k8s package, but here’s how to do it without taking that dependency.

From the inside of a pod, you can access the Kubernetes API by making HTTP requests to kubernetes.default. See this post for example. Here’s how to do that from Elixir.

The Kubernetes API is available at kubernetes.default, or via some environment variables:

# Or we can just use "https://kubernetes.default", which is guaranteed to be available.
host = System.fetch_env!("KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST")
port = System.fetch_env!("KUBERNETES_SERVICE_PORT") |> String.to_integer()

To make a query, you’ll need the namespace. You can get your container’s namespace as follows:

namespace = File.read!("/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace")

You’ll also need the path. The following lists pods with a particular label:

labelSelector = "app.kubernetes.io/name=cluster-demo" # or whatever
path = "/api/v1/namespaces/#{namespace}/pods" # list pods
query = "labelSelector=#{labelSelector}"

You need to combine the various URI pieces together. Elixir’s URI module doesn’t seem to implement this, so you’ll need to either using string interpolation, or use Erlang’s uri_string module. Here we do the latter:

uri = :uri_string.recompose(%{scheme: "https", host: host, port: port, path: path, query: query})

In order to authenticate with the Kubernetes API, you’ll need the service account token:

token = File.read!("/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token")

Rather than take a dependency on an external HTTP client, we can use use Erlang’s built-in httpc:

headers = [{'authorization', 'Bearer #{token}'}]
opts = [ssl: [verify: :verify_none], timeout: 15_000]


{:ok, {{_, 200, _}, _, body }} = :httpc.request(:get, {uri, headers}, opts, [])

…and then you parse the response. Unfortunately at this point, you do need to take a dependency on a JSON parser. We’ll use Jason.

pod_list = Jason.decode!(body)
pod_ips = for item <- pod_list["items"], do: item["status"]["podIP"]

The above is the equivalent of the following:

$ kubectl --namespace cluster-demo \
    get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=cluster-demo -o json | \
    jq -r '.items[].status.podIP'    # using jq
10.42.3.93
10.42.4.82
10.42.2.99

$ kubectl --namespace cluster-demo \
    get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=cluster-demo \
             -o jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{.status.podIP}{"\n"}{end}' # using jsonpath
10.42.3.93
10.42.4.82
10.42.2.99