Another way to keep your custom file’s content tailed aside of host file tailer service, to configure and use the file tailer webhook service. While the containers of the host file tailers run in a separated pod, file tailer webhook uses a different approach, it injects a sidecar container for every tailed file into your pod, triggered by a simple pod annotation.

Triggering the webhook 🔗︎

File tailer webhook is based on a Mutating Admission Webhook which gets called every time when a pod starts, and will be triggered when a pod specification contains an annotation with the sidecar.logging-extensions.banzaicloud.io/tail key. For example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
    name: test-pod
    annotations: {"sidecar.logging-extensions.banzaicloud.io/tail": "/var/log/date"}
spec:
    containers:
    - image: debian
        name: sample-container
        command: ["/bin/sh", "-c"]
        args:
            - while true; do
                date >> /var/log/date;
                sleep 1;
        done
    - image: debian
        name: sample-container2
...

Note: if the pod contains multiple containers, see Multi-container pods.

About the File Tailer Webhook annotation 🔗︎

The basic format of a file tailer webhook annotation is the following:

Key sidecar.logging-extensions.banzaicloud.io/tail
Value Files to be tailed separated by commas

For example:

...
metadata:
    name: test-pod
    annotations: {"sidecar.logging-extensions.banzaicloud.io/tail": "/var/log/date,/var/log/mycustomfile"}
spec:
...

Multi-container pods 🔗︎

In some cases you have multiple containers in your pod and you want to distinguish which file annotation belongs to which container. You can order every file annotations to particular container by prefixing the annotation with a ${ContainerName}: container key. For example:

...
metadata:
    name: test-pod
    annotations: {"sidecar.logging-extensions.banzaicloud.io/tail": "sample-container:/var/log/date,sample-container2:/var/log/anotherfile,/var/log/mycustomfile,foobarbaz:/foo/bar/baz"}
spec:
...

CAUTION:

  • Annotations without containername prefix: the file gets tailed on the default container (container 0)
  • Annotations with invalid containername: file tailer annotation gets discarded
Annotation Explanation
sample-container:/var/log/date tails file /var/log/date in sample-container
sample-container2:/var/log/anotherfile tails file /var/log/anotherfile in sample-container2
/var/log/mycustomfile tails file /var/log/mycustomfile in default container (sample-container)
foobarbaz:/foo/bar/baz will be discarded due to non-existing container name