List All Container Images Running in a Cluster
This page shows how to use kubectl to list all of the Container images for Pods running in a cluster.
- Before you begin
- List all Containers in all namespaces
- List Containers by Pod
- List Containers filtering by Pod label
- List Containers filtering by Pod namespace
- List Containers using a go-template instead of jsonpath
- What’s next
Before you begin
You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using Minikube, or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:
In this exercise you will use kubectl to fetch all of the Pods running in a cluster, and format the output to pull out the list of Containers for each.
List all Containers in all namespaces
- Fetch all Pods in all namespaces using
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces - Format the output to include only the list of Container image names
using
-o jsonpath={..image}. This will recursively parse out theimagefield from the returned json.- See the jsonpath reference for further information on how to use jsonpath.
- Format the output using standard tools:
tr,sort,uniq- Use
trto replace spaces with newlines - Use
sortto sort the results - Use
uniqto aggregate image counts
- Use
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o jsonpath="{..image}" |\
tr -s '[[:space:]]' '\n' |\
sort |\
uniq -c
The above command will recursively return all fields named image
for all items returned.
As an alternative, it is possible to use the absolute path to the image
field within the Pod. This ensures the correct field is retrieved
even when the field name is repeated,
e.g. many fields are called name within a given item:
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o jsonpath="{.items[*].spec.containers[*].image}"
The jsonpath is interpreted as follows:
.items[*]: for each returned value.spec: get the spec.containers[*]: for each container.image: get the image
Note: When fetching a single Pod by name, e.g. kubectl get pod nginx,
the .items[*] portion of the path should be omitted because a single
Pod is returned instead of a list of items.
List Containers by Pod
The formatting can be controlled further by using the range operation to
iterate over elements individually.
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o=jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{"\n"}{.metadata.name}{":\t"}{range .spec.containers[*]}{.image}{", "}{end}{end}' |\
sort
List Containers filtering by Pod label
To target only Pods matching a specific label, use the -l flag. The
following matches only Pods with labels matching app=nginx.
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o=jsonpath="{..image}" -l app=nginx
List Containers filtering by Pod namespace
To target only pods in a specific namespace, use the namespace flag. The
following matches only Pods in the kube-system namespace.
kubectl get pods --namespace kube-system -o jsonpath="{..image}"
List Containers using a go-template instead of jsonpath
As an alternative to jsonpath, Kubectl supports using go-templates for formatting the output:
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o go-template --template="{{range .items}}{{range .spec.containers}}{{.image}} {{end}}{{end}}"
What’s next
Reference
- Jsonpath reference guide
- Go template reference guide