Access running containers locally

You can forward your deployment and addons for local development, this allows you to access resources as if you were in your secure Northflank project network.

You can also open a shell in your running containers, giving you SSH-like access to the filesystem, environment, and processes.

Shell access gives you access to everything inside your container, such as environment, filesystem, processes, and the ability to run commands like top, npm, sed, vi, df. It also provides command completion and command history where possible.

You can access the shell of running containers in deployment and combined services by navigating to the containers page for the specific service. You can open a shell for a specific container by clicking shell access button.

Running job containers can be accessed by navigating to the job runs page and selecting an active job run. Click shell access button on the specific container to open a shell.

You can forward a deployment for local development and access using the Northflank CLI.

Your deployment must be running and have at least one port configured.

You can view and copy the command to connect to a deployment on the specific deployment's overview, in the local access section, or use the following commands:

• To forward a specific service:

  sudo northflank forward service --projectId [project-name] --serviceId [service-name]

• To forward all ports in a project:

  sudo northflank forward all --projectId [project-name]

You can now connect to your deployment locally on the available ports.

You can execute commands in a service in a template or release flow by using an action node.

Commands supplied in an action node will not be executed with a shell by default. This means commands executed without a shell will not be able to use any shell features, and will directly pass all strings after the specified executable as parameters without any evaluation.

If you require a shell you must explicitly invoke it first, for example sh -c. You can then include your command in the release flow or template after sh -c in quote marks escaped with a backslash (\").

Below is an example of a command run with and without a shell in a template's action node. The commands are executed in a service container which has the environment variable MESSAGE with the value Hello!.