k8dash is the easiest way to manage your Kubernetes cluster. Why?
- Full cluster management: Namespaces, Nodes, Pods, Replica Sets, Deployments, Storage, RBAC and more
- Blazing fast and Always Live: no need to refresh pages to see the latest
- Quickly visualize cluster health at a glance: Real time charts help quickly track down poorly performing resources
- Easy CRUD and scaling: plus inline API docs to easily understand what each field does
- 100% responsive (runs on your phone/tablet)
- Simple OpenID integration: no special proxies required
- Simple installation: use the provided yaml resources to have k8dash up and running in under 1 minute (no, seriously)
- A running Kubernetes cluster (e.g., minikube)
- metrics server installed (optional, but strongly recommended)
- A Kubernetes cluster configured for OpenId Connect authentication (optional)
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Deploy k8dash with something like the following...
NOTE: never trust a file downloaded from the internet. Make sure to review the contents of kubernetes-k8dash.yaml before running the script below.
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/herbrandson/k8dash/master/kubernetes-k8dash.yamlTo access k8dash, you must make it publicly visible. If you have an ingress server setup, you can accomplish by adding a route like the following
kind: Ingress
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
metadata:
name: k8dash
namespace: kube-system
spec:
rules:
-
host: k8dash.example.com
http:
paths:
-
path: /
backend:
serviceName: k8dash
servicePort: 80Back to Table of Contents
Unfortunately, kubectl proxy can not be used to access k8dash. According to the information at kubernetes/kubernetes#38775 (comment), it seems that kubectl proxy strips the Authorization header when it proxies requests. From that link:
this is working as expected. "proxying" through the apiserver will not get you standard proxy behavior (preserving Authorization headers end-to-end), because the API is not being used as a standard proxy
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There are multiple options logging into the dashboard.
The first (and easiest) option is to create a dedicated service account. The can be accomplished using the following script.
# Create the service account in the current namespace (we assume default)
kubectl create serviceaccount k8dash-sa
# Give that service account root on the cluster
kubectl create clusterrolebinding k8dash-sa --clusterrole=cluster-admin --serviceaccount=default:k8dash-sa
# Find the secret that was created to hold the token for the SA
kubectl get secrets
# Show the contents of the secret to extract the token
kubectl describe secret k8dash-sa-token-xxxxx
Retrieve the token value from the secret and enter it into the login screen to access the dashboard.
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k8dash makes using OpenId Connect for authentication easy. Assuming your cluster is configured to use OIDC, all you need to do is create a secret containing your credentials and run the kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml config.
To learn more about configuring a cluster for OIDC, check out these great links
- https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/authentication/
- https://medium.com/@mrbobbytables/kubernetes-day-2-operations-authn-authz-with-oidc-and-a-little-help-from-keycloak-de4ea1bdbbe
- https://medium.com/@int128/kubectl-with-openid-connect-43120b451672
- https://www.google.com/search?q=kubernetes+configure+oidc&oq=kubernetes+configure+oidc&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.4772j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
You can deploy k8dash with oidc support using something like the following script...
NOTE: never trust a file downloaded from the internet. Make sure to review the contents of kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml before running the script below.
OIDC_URL=<put your endpoint url here... something like https://accounts.google.com>
OIDC_ID=<put your id here... something like blah-blah-blah.apps.googleusercontent.com>
OIDC_SECRET=<put your oidc secret here>
kubectl create secret -n kube-system generic k8dash \
--from-literal=url="$OIDC_URL" \
--from-literal=id="$OIDC_ID" \
--from-literal=secret="$OIDC_SECRET"
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/herbrandson/k8dash/master/kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml
Additionally, there are a few other OIDC options you can provide via environment variables. First is OIDC_SCOPES. The default value for this value is openid email, but additional scopes can also be added using something like OIDC_SCOPES="openid email groups".
The other option is OIDC_METADATA. k8dash uses the excellent node-openid-client module. OIDC_METADATA will take a json string and pass it to the Client constructor. Docs here. For example, OIDC_METADATA='{"token_endpoint_auth_method":"client_secret_post"}
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If you do not have an ingress server setup, you can utilize a NodePort service as configured in the kubernetes-k8dash-nodeport.yaml. This is ideal when creating a single node master, or if you want to get up and running as fast as possible.
This will map the k8dash port 4654 to a randomly selected port on the running node. The assigned port can be found using
$ kubectl get svc --namespace=kube-system
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
k8dash NodePort 10.107.107.62 <none> 4654:32565/TCP 1m
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k8dash relies heavily on metrics-server to display real time cluster metrics. It is strongly recommended to have metrics-server installed to get the best experiance from k8dash.
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- A running Kubernetes cluster.
Installing and running minikube is an easy way to get this.
Once minikube is installed, you can run it with the command
minikube start --driver=docker - Once the cluster is up and running, create some login credentials as described above
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To run the server, run npm i from the /server directory to install dependencies and then npm start to run the server.
The server is a simple express.js server that is primarily responsible for proxying requests to the Kubernetes api server.
During development, the server will use whatever is configured in ~/.kube/config to connect the desired cluster. If you are using minikube, for example, you can run kubectl config set-context minikube to get ~/.kube/config set up correctly.
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The client is a React application (using TypeScript) with minimal other dependencies.
To run the client, open a new terminal tab and navigate to the /client directory, run npm i and then npm start. This will open up a browser window to your local k8dash dashboard. If everything compiles correctly, it will load the site and then an error message will pop up Unhandled Rejection (Error): Api request error: Forbidden.... The error message has an 'X' in the top righthand corner to close that message. After you close it, you should see the UI where you can enter your token.
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