Management
One-off Commands

Convox allows you to execute individual commands on your containers in several different contexts.

To run a command on a container in your Convox rack…

  • in a new container: convox run [service] [command]
  • in a running container: convox exec [container ID] [command]

To run a command in a local container…

  • in a new container: convox start [service] [command]
  • in a running container: There is no convox command for this. Use docker exec instead.

We’ll go into more detail about each of these commands below.

convox run

Syntax: convox run [service] [command] Use: Spawns a new container in your Convox rack to run the desired command.

Examples:

$ convox run web ls
Dockerfile  assets  bin  counter.py  requirements.txt  templates

You can spawn an interactive shell:

$ convox run web bash
root@eafc101d0980:/src#

Or run one-off administrative tasks:

$ convox run web bin/migrate
Migrating database... Done

Detached processes and timeouts

By default, convox run processes are run interactively (“attached”). This means you can interact with the running process via the terminal (stdin and stdout). Attached processes have a timeout of 1 hour. Use --timeout [seconds] to increase this:

$ convox run web --timeout 7200 bin/long_running_process

If you don’t need to run a process interactively, you can add the --detach option to your convox run command:

$ convox run web --detach bin/long_running_process

Detached processes have no timeout and their output is available in the application logs.

convox exec

Syntax: convox exec [container ID] [command] Use: Attaches to and executes the command in an existing container on your Convox rack.

Use convox ps to get the container ID:

$ convox ps
ID            NAME  RELEASE      SIZE  STARTED     COMMAND
310481bf223f  web   RSPZQWVWGOP  256   5 days ago  bin/web
5e3c8576b942  web   RSPZQWVWGOP  256   4 days ago  bin/web

Examples: You can spawn an interactive shell:

$ convox exec 5e3c8576b942 bash
/app #

or run a one-off command:

$ convox exec 0105c73ce736 ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
   12 ?        00:00:00 sh
   16 ?        00:00:00 ps

$ convox exec 0105c73ce736 env
REDIS_PORT=6379
RACK=python
HOSTNAME=13e67aec1985
FOO=bar
BAZ=qux
[snip]

convox cp

Syntax: convox cp [relative local file path] [container ID]:[remote absolute file path] Use: Copies from a local machine to a remote machine

Use convox ps to get the container ID:

$ convox ps
ID            NAME  RELEASE      SIZE  STARTED     COMMAND
310481bf223f  web   RSPZQWVWGOP  256   5 days ago  bin/web
5e3c8576b942  web   RSPZQWVWGOP  256   4 days ago  bin/web

Examples: Copy a file from a local machine to a remote container:

$ convox cp foo/bar.txt 5e3c8576b942:/app/foo/bar.txt