crictl is a command-line client for Kubernetes CRI-compatible container runtimes.

Click here to learn more about Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI).

Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI) was introduced to make Kubernetes container runtime-agnostic. The Kubernetes node agent, kubelet, implementing the CRI client API, can use any container runtime implementing the CRI server API to manage containers and pods on its node.

Kubernetes CRI.

Since version 1.1, containerd comes with a built-in CRI plugin. Hence, containerd is a CRI-compatible container runtime. Therefore, it can be used with crictl.

crictl was created to inspect and debug container runtimes and applications on a Kubernetes node. It supports the following operations: