# Pod Lifecycle — Individual container restart policy and rules

> If your cluster has the feature gate ContainerRestartRules enabled, you can specify restartPolicy and restartPolicyRules on _individual containers_ to override the Pod restart policy.

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## Metadata

- Canonical URL: <https://wikikv.com/k/ref-kubernetes-100c79e0c48dc42b5e0e>
- Knowledge kind: `reference`
- Confidence: `0.72`
- Independent verifications: `0`
- Updated: `2026-08-16T09:31:43.045148+00:00`
- Tags: `reference-seed`, `kubernetes`, `concepts`, `workloads`, `pods`, `pod`, `lifecycle`, `individual`, `container`, `restart`, `policy`, `rules`

## Provenance

- Source: <https://github.com/kubernetes/website/blob/6449f1eced66d36159c06c3cfae1d1aeec40d4a3/content/en/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod-lifecycle.md>
- Source name: Kubernetes Documentation
- Source revision: `6449f1eced66d36159c06c3cfae1d1aeec40d4a3`
- Source license: `CC-BY-4.0`
- Attribution and license details: <https://wikikv.com/licenses>

## Knowledge

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions).

If your cluster has the feature gate ContainerRestartRules enabled, you can specify restartPolicy and restartPolicyRules on _individual containers_ to override the Pod restart policy. Container restart policy and rules applies to in the Pod and to regular init containers.

A Kubernetes-native sidecar container has its container-level restartPolicy set to Always.

The container restarts will follow the same exponential backoff as pod restart policy described above. Supported container restart policies

Always: Automatically restarts the container after any termination. OnFailure: Only restarts the container if it exits with an error (non-zero exit status). Never: Does not automatically restart the terminated container.

Additionally, _individual containers_ can specify restartPolicyRules. If the restartPolicyRules field is specified, then container restartPolicy must also be specified. The restartPolicyRules define a list of rules to apply on container exit. Each rule will consist of a condition and an action. The supported condition is exitCodes, which compares the exit code of the container with a list of given values. The supported action is Restart, which means the container will be restarted. The rules will be evaluated in order. On the first match, the action will be applied. If none of the rules’ conditions matched, Kubernetes fallback to container’s configured restartPolicy.

For example, a Pod with OnFailure restart policy that have a try-once container. This allows Pod to only restart certain containers

Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically):
```yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: on-failure-pod
spec:
  restartPolicy: OnFailure
  containers:
  - name: try-once-container    # This container will run only once because the restartPolicy is Never.
    image: registry.k8s.io/busybox:1.27.2
    command: ['sh', '-c', 'echo "Only running once" &amp;&amp; sleep 10 &amp;&amp; exit 1']
    restartPolicy: Never
  - name: on-failure-container  # This container will be restarted on failure.
    image: registry.k8s.io/busybox:1.27.2
    command: ['sh', '-c', 'echo "Keep restarting" &amp;&amp; sleep 1800 &amp;&amp; exit 1']
``` …

Attribution: Adapted from Kubernetes Documentation under CC-BY-4.0. Adaptation: WikiKV isolated this documentation section, normalized formatting, retained only bounded code excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.