Use an Image Volume With a Pod

This page shows how to configure a pod using image volumes. This allows you to mount content from OCI registries inside containers.

Before you begin

You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. It is recommended to run this tutorial on a cluster with at least two nodes that are not acting as control plane hosts. If you do not already have a cluster, you can create one by using minikube or you can use one of these Kubernetes playgrounds:

• Killercoda
• Play with Kubernetes

• The container runtime needs to support the image volumes feature
• You need to exec commands in the host
• You need to be able to exec into pods
• You need to enable the ImageVolume feature gate

Run a Pod that uses an image volume

An image volume for a pod is enabled setting the volumes.[*].image field of .spec to a valid reference and consuming it in the volumeMounts of the container. For example:

pods/image-volumes.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: image-volume
spec:
  containers:
  - name: shell
    command: ["sleep", "infinity"]
    image: debian
    volumeMounts:
    - name: volume
      mountPath: /volume
  volumes:
  - name: volume
    image:
      reference: quay.io/crio/artifact:v1
      pullPolicy: IfNotPresent

1. Create the pod on your cluster:

   kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/pods/image-volumes.yaml
   

2. Attach to the container:

   kubectl attach -it image-volume bash
   

Run this command:

cat /volume/dir/file

The output is similar to:

1

Also run:

cat /volume/file

The output is similar to:

2

Further reading

• image volumes