Use an Image Volume With a Pod
Kubernetes v1.33 [beta] (enabled by default: false)
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:
Your Kubernetes server must be at or later than version v1.31.To check the version, enter kubectl version.
- 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
ImageVolumefeature gate
Run a Pod that uses an image volume
An image volume for a pod is enabled by setting the volumes.[*].image field of .spec
to a valid reference and consuming it in the volumeMounts of the container. For example:
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:v2
pullPolicy: IfNotPresent
-
Create the pod on your cluster:
kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/pods/image-volumes.yaml -
Attach to the container:
kubectl attach -it image-volume bash -
Check the content of a file in the volume:
cat /volume/dir/fileThe output is similar to:
1You can also check another file in a different path:
cat /volume/fileThe output is similar to:
2
Use subPath (or subPathExpr)
It is possible to utilize
subPath or
subPathExpr
from Kubernetes v1.33 when using the image volume feature.
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: image-volume
spec:
containers:
- name: shell
command: ["sleep", "infinity"]
image: debian
volumeMounts:
- name: volume
mountPath: /volume
subPath: dir
volumes:
- name: volume
image:
reference: quay.io/crio/artifact:v2
pullPolicy: IfNotPresent
-
Create the pod on your cluster:
kubectl apply -f https://k8s.io/examples/pods/image-volumes-subpath.yaml -
Attach to the container:
kubectl attach -it image-volume bash -
Check the content of the file from the
dirsub path in the volume:cat /volume/fileThe output is similar to:
1