File Tailer Webhook

Another way to keep your custom file’s content tailed aside of the host file tailer service, is 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: if a pod has a specific annotation, the webhook injects a sidecar container for every tailed file into the pod.

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. The value of the annotation is the file (including path) you want to tail. 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
...

To tail multiple files, add only one annotation, and separate the filenames with commas, for example:

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

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:

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:
...