Access the Console

Once Lightbend Console is installed, you’ll need to setup external access for the appropriate users. There are many options to expose the Console during development and production:

• For clusters in a production environment, Ingress is the recommended approach. Because Ingress configuration is highly dependent on your existing distributed environment and requires careful security consideration, it is beyond the scope of this document. However, the Ingress section below provides an example of how to refer to the Lightbend Console in a .yaml file.

• For development environments with local clusters, Console access is much simpler: For Minikube, you can use the built in NodePort to access it locally and the Kubernetes documentation describes many other ways for for accessing a Service directly.

Minikube

For Minikube, accessing the Console is straightforward. If you installed with the --set exposeServices=NodePort option, you can access the Console using:

minikube service expose-es-console -n lightbend

This should open your browser to something like: http://192.168.99.100:30080/cluster. In some cases, the IP address might be different.

Minishift & OpenShift

To access Lightbend Console when using OpenShift or Minishift, expose the console-server service. OpenShift creates a route for the service. Use the following command to expose the service and get the route:

oc expose service console-server
oc get routes

For example, with the sample output below, you can access the Console at: http://console-server-lightbend.192.168.99.102.nip.io/cluster

console-server   console-server-lightbend.192.168.99.102.nip.io     console-server   8080     None

Ingress

Ingress is the recommended production-ready mechanism for external access into a Kubernetes cluster. Ingress setup is dependent on the environment and Ingress controller installed.

Setting up an Ingress controller is beyond the scope of this document, please see the official documentation.

The Helm chart for the Lightbend Console provides a Kubernetes service called console-server that you can expose with Ingress. The following yaml file provides an example:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: es-console-ingress
  namespace: lightbend
spec:
  backend:
    serviceName: console-server
    servicePort: 80

Development access

Kubernetes provides a few different mechanisms for external access of services that don’t require setting up Ingress.

kubectl port-forward

The port forwarding mechanism in kubectl can be used for ad-hoc access. It will perform significantly better than kubectl proxy, but requires at least Kubernetes 1.10.

kubectl -n lightbend port-forward svc/console-server 5000:80

Then you can access Lightbend Console on http://127.0.0.1:5000.

kubectl proxy

A simple approach that works across all versions of Kubernetes is to use kubectl proxy to setup a local reverse-proxy into the cluster:

kubectl proxy

Then you can access Lightbend Console at something like: http://127.0.0.1:8001/api/v1/namespaces/<lightbend>/services/console-server:http/proxy/, by replacing lightbend with the namespace you installed it into.

The main drawback of this approach is performance. It proxies every call between your browser and the Console via the Kubernetes apiserver. This puts extra load on the apiserver and can make the browser experience quite slow. But it’s an easy way to get started quick.

LoadBalancer service

For environments that support it (generally any cloud provider, such as AWS or GCP), you can setup a LoadBalancer Service. Create the service using kubectl expose in the namespace where Lightbend Console is installed (lightbend by default):

kubectl expose deployment es-console -n lightbend --type=LoadBalancer --name=access-es-console

To discover the external IP, list the service:

kubectl get services -n lightbend access-es-console

Should display something like:

NAME                TYPE        CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP      PORT(S)    AGE
access-es-console   ClusterIP   10.3.245.137   104.198.205.71   8080/TCP   54s

In this example, the Lightbend Console would be accessible at http://104.198.205.71:8080.

NodePort service

In environments that don’t support LoadBalancer, you can expose the Service via a port on every single Kubernetes node. This is called a NodePort.

Create the service using kubectl:

kubectl expose deployment es-console -n lightbend --type=NodePort --name=access-es-console

To discover the node port, list the service:

kubectl get services -n lightbend access-es-console

Should display something like:

NAME                TYPE       CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE
access-es-console   NodePort   10.109.189.117   <none>        8080:32536/TCP   8s

In this case, the node port is 32536. Next, you need to find a node IP to use:

kubectl get nodes -o wide

Should display something like:

NAME       STATUS    ROLES     AGE       VERSION   EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE            KERNEL-VERSION   CONTAINER-RUNTIME
node-1     Ready     node      43d       v1.10.0   10.5.5.5      Buildroot 2018.05   4.15.0           docker://17.12.1-ce
node-2     Ready     node      43d       v1.10.0   10.5.5.6      Buildroot 2018.05   4.15.0           docker://17.12.1-ce

You can pick any node’s EXTERNAL-IP.

So the Lightbend Console would be accessible at http://10.5.5.5:32536.