minikube Ingress

While minikube supports LoadBalancer type services, it doesn’t actually create an external load balancer. Rather, it opens a NodePort for these services - crucial information when it comes to using Ingress.

This article will demonstrate how to activate and manage the Ingress Controller and Ingress resources on minikube.

Powering Up the Ingress Controller

Minikube conveniently comes with a built-in ingress addon that you can easily activate.

$ minikube addons enable ingress

Wait a while, and soon enough, the nginx-ingress-controller and default-http-backend will kick into action.

$ kubectl get pods -n kube-system
NAME                             READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
default-http-backend-5374j       1/1       Running   0          1m
kube-addon-manager-minikube      1/1       Running   0          2m
kube-dns-268032401-rhrx6         3/3       Running   0          1m
kubernetes-dashboard-xh74p       1/1       Running   0          2m
nginx-ingress-controller-78mk6   1/1       Running   0          1m

Crafting an Ingress

First, let's enable an echo server service.

$ kubectl run echoserver --image=gcr.io/google_containers/echoserver:1.4 --port=8080
$ kubectl expose deployment echoserver --type=NodePort
$ minikube service echoserver --url
http://192.168.64.36:31957

Next, we'll craft an Ingress that can forward http://mini-echo.io and http://mini-web.io/echo to our newly created echoserver service.

$ cat <<EOF | kubectl create -f -
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: echo
  annotations:
    ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /
spec:
  backend:
    serviceName: default-http-backend
    servicePort: 80
  rules:
  - host: mini-echo.io
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        backend:
          serviceName: echoserver
          servicePort: 8080
  - host: mini-web.io
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /echo
        backend:
          serviceName: echoserver
          servicePort: 8080
EOF

To access the mini-echo.io and mini-web.io domain names, manually add a mapping in hosts.

$ echo "$(minikube ip) mini-echo.io mini-web.io" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

After this, you can access the service via http://mini-echo.io and http://mini-web.io/echo.

Using xip.io

The previous method requires manual configuration of hosts every time a different domain name is used. By making use of xip.io, we can bypass this step.

Just like before, we start by enabling a nginx service.

$ kubectl run nginx --image=nginx --port=80
$ kubectl expose deployment nginx --type=NodePort

Next, we'll create an Ingress. The difference here is that the host uses nginx.$(minikube ip).xip.io:

$ cat <<EOF | kubectl create -f -
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
 name: my-nginx-ingress
spec:
 rules:
  - host: nginx.$(minikube ip).xip.io
    http:
     paths:
      - path: /
        backend:
         serviceName: nginx
         servicePort: 80
EOF

Now, we can directly access the domain name:

$ curl nginx.$(minikube ip).xip.io