Custom Domain Names with NGINX

Introduction

In the quick setup guides presented in the Self-Hosted chapter, we showed you how to expose your OpenSquiggly instance using a Load Balancer and a hard-coded IP address.

We provided these instructions to give you a very fast way to configure OpenSquiggly for a quick evaluation setup. However, once you decide to continue to use OpenSquiggly for your team in a production environment, you’ll want to migrate away from hard-coded IP address so that teams can access the instance via a bona fide DNS name.

In Kubernetes, the way to accomplish this is by installing an ingress controller. The ingress controller provides a way to map an inbound domain name to your Kubernetes service.

There are various ingress controllers available. The NGINX ingress controller is one of the most commonly used, and we discuss how to use it in this document.

Install the NGINX Controller using Helm

There are multiple ways to install the NGINX ingress controller, but for the purposes of these instructions, we’re going to use a Helm chart. Consult your cloud engineering team to see if an NGINX controller is already installed on your cluster, or if the team prefers an alternate installation method.

Steps to Complete

1. Ensure your kubectl and helm CLI programs are install using the instructions here.
2. Add the ingress-nginx repository to your helm repositories list with the command:

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

3. Verify that the ingress-nginx repository was successfully added with the command:

   helm repo list
   

   which should show you a list of your current Helm repositories such as:

   NAME             URL                                       
   stable           https://charts.helm.sh/stable             
   bitnami          https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami         
   ingress-nginx    https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx   <---- Newly added Helm repository
   opensquiggly     https://opensquiggly.github.io/helm-charts
   .
   .  (... etc ...)
   .   
   

4. Install the NGINX controller into your current Kubernetes context using the command:

   helm install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx --create-namespace --namespace ingress-nginx
   

5. Verify that the NGINX Helm chart successfully installed the NGINX ingress controller using the command:

   kubectl get all --namespace ingress-nginx
   

   This should give you a list of all the resouces that the Helm chart installed, such as:

   NAME                                           READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   pod/ingress-nginx-controller-bfc454775-vsqmb   1/1     Running   0          40m
   
   NAME                                         TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP       PORT(S)                      AGE
   service/ingress-nginx-controller-admission   ClusterIP      10.43.123.52   <none>            443/TCP                      40m
   service/ingress-nginx-controller             LoadBalancer   10.43.103.33   131.153.226.147   80:30544/TCP,443:31551/TCP   40m
   
   NAME                                       READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
   deployment.apps/ingress-nginx-controller   1/1     1            1           40m
   
   NAME                                                 DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
   replicaset.apps/ingress-nginx-controller-bfc454775   1         1         1       40m
   

6. In the event that your cluster has multiple ingress controllers running in it, to see the list of available ingress class names, use the command:

   kubectl get ingressclass
   

   which should display an output list such as:

     NAME    CONTROLLER             PARAMETERS   AGE
     nginx   k8s.io/ingress-nginx   <none>       29m
   # -----
   #   ^
   #   |
   #   +------ This is the name you will use in later steps to expose the OpenSquiggly service.
   #           In the OpenSquiggly "allinone" Helm chart, use this value for the "exposeWith"
   #           parameter.
   

7. Assuming you installed the ingress controller into the suggested namespace “ingress-nginx”, use the following command to determine the external IP address of the associated Load Balancer that is tied to the ingress controller.

   kubectl get service --namespace ingress-nginx
   

   which should display an output such as:

   NAME                                 TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP       PORT(S)                      AGE
   ingress-nginx-controller-admission   ClusterIP      10.43.123.52   <none>            443/TCP                      34m
   ingress-nginx-controller             LoadBalancer   10.43.103.33   131.153.226.147   80:30544/TCP,443:31551/TCP   34m
   

   In the above example, we see the NGINX ingress controler is available on the external IP address “131.152.226.147”. We can now create DNS names, either manually or automatically using ExternalDNS, and users should be able to access services on the cluster that are exposed via the ingress controller.