“gray string” by on Ronald Smeets Unsplash Finally you have deployed your app to Kubernetes and you bought a cool domain name — ever wondered how to point your cool domain like , but cooler, to an app running inside Kubernetes? Well, read on and I’ll try to explain how to do just that! www.mydomain.com What do you need? Before we get started, make sure you have the following: Kubernetes cluster and access to it (i.e. you can deploy stuff) Your app* running in the Kubernetes cluster Registered domain name (I am using for my domains, but any other registrar works as well) Name.com Helm * I am using the word to represent your code that runs in your cluster and you want to access it through the domain name. Your code is running inside of a Docker image and a Kubernetes pod that’s part of a deployment and is exposed through a Kubernetes service. But is what I’ll use to refer to all this. app app Here are the rough steps to follow to hook up the domain with your service: Create an Ingress resource Deploy the Ingress controller Update the domain records to point to the cluster Accessing Kubernetes from the outside A Kubernetes resource called is what manages external access to the apps running inside the cluster. With ingress, you can define rules that tell Kubernetes how to route external traffic to your app. Here’s how an example Ingress resource looks like: Ingress apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1kind: Ingressmetadata: name: my-ingress annotations: However, this resource alone is not enough — you also need a controller that knows how to direct the traffic. I will be using the NGINX Ingress Controller, but there are others you could use as well (check out more docs ). We will be using to deploy the chart like this: here Helm nginx-ingress helm install stable/nginx-ingress The above command takes care of installing the NGINX controller and a default backend. Default backend is an ‘app’ that the ingress will point to by default or in case there are no services defined. As part of the NGINX controller you will also get a service with type LoadBalancer — this is where we you point your domain to. Note that there are a plethora of buttons and knobs you can adjust and twist when deploying the controller — there’s a whole list of them . here With the NGINX ingress controller deployed, let’s figure out what the IP address of the cluster is by running this command: kubectl get services --all-namespaces Above command will list out all Kubernetes services running in all namespaces. What you are interested in is any service of type and any service that has an set (it’s usually the same service). Here’s how a sample output of the command would look like: LoadBalancer external IP virtuous-gohper is the name Helm picked for the NGINX controller The value that’s grayed out next to the service in the image above is what you need. This is the IP address you will point your domain to. *nginx-ingress-controller Or, if you want to be more fancy, you can also run the command below that will filter all services by their type (LoadBalancer) and return you the name and the IP address: kubectl get svc --all-namespaces -o jsonpath='{range .items[?(@.spec.type=="LoadBalancer")]}{.metadata.name}:{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}{"\n"}{end}' Pointing your domain to the cluster Depending on where you registered your domain, the steps might be a bit different, but the gist is the same — you need to create an and DNS records to point your domain (host) to the cluster. A CNAME My registrar is Name.com, but I am pretty sure other registrars have some good docs on how to do this as well. Heavily redacted view of the DNS records for my domain Here’s what I did: on Name.com I went to my domain and opened the DNS records tab. From there, I was able to add an record with the host called and as an answer, I entered my clusters IP address. A www.mycoolapp.mydomain.com Similarly, I created a record and pointed to the cluster host name (usually, you can find this in your cloud providers settings). You don’t have to provide a , an record is enough. Note that if you don’t provide the , then will not resolve to your app! CNAME mycoolapp.mydomain.com CNAME A CNAME mycoolapp.mydomain.com Test it out! Fire up your favorite terminal or browser and navigate to . Tadaaa — you should be able to get a response back (in my case, the app I deployed was a simple NGINX container, thus the default NGINX page) mycoolapp.mydomain.com Yes, I own containers.social domain… and bunch more that I’ll never use Thanks for Reading! Any feedback on this article is more than welcome! You can also follow me on and . If you liked this and want to get notified when I write more stuff, you should subscribe to ! Twitter GitHub my newsletter
