Deployment with Docker

Attaching to a container's process space

There may be times when a container is running with a minimalist distribution such as Alpine Linux (https://www.alpinelinux.org/) and the container in question has an issue with a process that you would like to debug but also lacks the most basic tooling you need for debugging included. By default, Docker isolates all containers in their individual process namespace so our current debugging workflow, which we used before by attaching to that container directly and trying to figure out what was wrong with very limited tooling is not going to help us much here.

Luckily for us though, Docker is fully capable of joining the process namespaces of two containers with the docker run --pid "container:<name_or_id>" ...