# The 3 Kamal Execs


There are 3 kinds of `kamal exec` commands. Shit's always confusing. So I wrote this to unconfuse me.

## Interactive bash session:
You have to run these locally, from the project's root folder.

### To start one in the host server:
```
kamal server exec -i "/bin/bash"
```

(You can also just ssh into the server for this usecase. But with the kamal way, you can run them on specific hosts (--primary).)

### To start one in the main web app's container:
```
kamal app exec --interactive --reuse "bin/rails console"
kamal app exec -i --reuse "/bin/bash"
kamal app exec -i --reuse "bash"
kamal app exec -i --reuse "bin/rails dbconsole --include-password" # will start psql if the rails app used pg
```

### To start one in the accessory service's container:
```
kamal accessory exec -i --reuse "/bin/bash"
```

## One-off commands
Instead of an interactive bash session, you can just execute the desired command in one go.
Just drop the `-i` (`--interactive`) flag. And mention the command in place of `/bin/bash`.

If the command doesn't recognize "/bin/bash", try just "sh". It might work.

## Doing the same from within the host machine
The above are just wrappers around `docker exec`.
So you can just ssh into the host machine and do the following instead of the above ones.
These would also feel much faster than the above.

Run `docker ps` to get the IDs of the running containers.

Use them to start an interactive session using `docker exec` like so:

```
docker exec -it <container-id> "/bin/bash"
```