Introduction to NGINX Ingress Controller

Create a kubernetes cluster

In this guide we we''ll need a Kubernetes cluster for testing. Let's create one using kind

kind create cluster --name nginx-ingress --image kindest/node:v1.23.5

See cluster up and running:

kubectl get nodes
NAME                  STATUS   ROLES                  AGE     VERSION
nginx-ingress-control-plane   Ready    control-plane,master   2m12s   v1.23.5

Run a container to work in

run Alpine Linux:

docker run -it --rm -v ${HOME}:/root/ -v ${PWD}:/work -w /work --net host alpine sh

install some tools

# install curl 
apk add --no-cache curl

# install kubectl 
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/`curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt`/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl
chmod +x ./kubectl
mv ./kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

# install helm 

curl -o /tmp/helm.tar.gz -LO https://get.helm.sh/helm-v3.10.1-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -C /tmp/ -zxvf /tmp/helm.tar.gz
mv /tmp/linux-amd64/helm /usr/local/bin/helm
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/helm

test cluster access:

/work # kubectl get nodes
NAME                    STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
nginx-ingress-control-plane   Ready    control-plane,master   3m26s   v1.23.5

NGINX Ingress Controller

We'll start with the documentation as always
You can find the Kubernetes NGINX documentation here

First thing we do is check the compatibility matrix to ensure we are deploying a compatible version of NGINX Ingress on our Kubernetes cluster

The Documentation also has a link to the GitHub Repo which has a compatibility matrix

Get the installation YAML

The controller ships as a helm chart, so we can grab version v1.5.1 as per the compatibility matrix.

From our container we can do this:

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
helm search repo ingress-nginx --versions

From the app version we select the version that matches the compatibility matrix.

NAME                            CHART VERSION   APP VERSION     DESCRIPTION
ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx     4.4.0           1.5.1           Ingress controller for Kubernetes using NGINX a...

Now we can use helm to install the chart directly if we want.
Or we can use helm to grab the manifest and explore its content.
We can also add that manifest to our git repo if we are using a GitOps workflow to deploy it.

CHART_VERSION="4.4.0"
APP_VERSION="1.5.1"

mkdir ./kubernetes/ingress/controller/nginx/manifests/

helm template ingress-nginx ingress-nginx \
--repo https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx \
--version ${CHART_VERSION} \
--namespace ingress-nginx \
> ./kubernetes/ingress/controller/nginx/manifests/nginx-ingress.${APP_VERSION}.yaml

Deploy the Ingress controller

kubectl create namespace ingress-nginx
kubectl apply -f ./kubernetes/ingress/controller/nginx/manifests/nginx-ingress.${APP_VERSION}.yaml

Check the installation

kubectl -n ingress-nginx get pods

The traffic for our cluster will come in over the Ingress service
Note that we dont have load balancer capability in kind by default, so our LoadBalancer is pending:

kubectl -n ingress-nginx get svc
NAME                                 TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                      AGE
ingress-nginx-controller             LoadBalancer   10.96.130.21    <pending>     80:31011/TCP,443:31772/TCP   26m
ingress-nginx-controller-admission   ClusterIP      10.96.125.210   <none>        443/TCP                      26m

For testing purposes, we will simply setup port-forwarding
If you are running in the cloud, you will get a real IP address.

kubectl -n ingress-nginx port-forward svc/ingress-nginx-controller 443

We can reach our controller on https://localhost/

Features

Routing DOMAIN
SSL terminating & passthrough
routing URL

customization (configmap)

location snippet
log formating

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