On most Kubernetes clusters, the ingress controller will work without requiring any extra configuration. If you want to get started as fast as possible, you can check the [quick start](#quick-start) instructions. However, in many environments, you can improve the performance or get better logs by enabling extra features. we recommend that you check the [environment-specific instructions](#environment-specific-instructions) for details about optimizing the ingress controller for your particular environment or cloud provider.
<!-- TODO: We have subdirectories for kubernetes versions now because of a PR https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/pull/8162 . You can see this here https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/tree/main/deploy/static/provider/cloud . We need to add documentation here that is clear and unambiguous in guiding users to pick the deployment manifest under a subdirectory, based on the K8S version being used. But until the explicit clear docs land here, users are recommended to feel free to use those subdirectories and get the manifest(s) related to their K8S version. -->
The YAML manifest in the command above was generated with `helm template`, so you will end up with almost the same resources as if you had used Helm to install the controller.
At this point, if you access http://demo.localdev.me:8080/, you should see an HTML page telling you "It works!".
### Online testing
If your Kubernetes cluster is a "real" cluster that supports services of type `LoadBalancer`, it will have allocated an external IP address or FQDN to the ingress controller.
You can see that IP address or FQDN with the following command:
```console
kubectl get service ingress-nginx-controller --namespace=ingress-nginx
It will be the `EXTERNAL-IP` field. If that field shows `<pending>`, this means that your Kubernetes cluster wasn't able to provision the load balancer (generally, this is because it doesn't support services of type `LoadBalancer`).
Once you have the external IP address (or FQDN), set up a DNS record pointing to it. Then you can create an ingress resource. The following example assumes that you have set up a DNS record for `www.demo.io`:
You should then be able to see the "It works!" page when you connect to http://www.demo.io/. Congratulations, you are serving a public web site hosted on a Kubernetes cluster! 🎉
The ingress controller can be installed on Docker Desktop using the default [quick start](#quick-start) instructions.
On most systems, if you don't have any other service of type `LoadBalancer` bound to port 80, the ingress controller will be assigned the `EXTERNAL-IP` of `localhost`, which means that it will be reachable on localhost:80. If that doesn't work, you might have to fall back to the `kubectl port-forward` method described in the [local testing section](#local-testing).
### Cloud deployments
If the load balancers of your cloud provider do active healthchecks on their backends (most do), you can change the `externalTrafficPolicy` of the ingress controller Service to `Local` (instead of the default `Cluster`) to save an extra hop in some cases. If you're installing with Helm, this can be done by adding `--set controller.service.externalTrafficPolicy=Local` to the `helm install` or `helm upgrade` command.
Furthermore, if the load balancers of your cloud provider support the PROXY protocol, you can enable it, and it will let the ingress controller see the real IP address of the clients. Otherwise, it will generally see the IP address of the upstream load balancer. This must be done both in the ingress controller (with e.g. `--set controller.config.use-proxy-protocol=true`) and in the cloud provider's load balancer configuration to function correctly.
In the following sections, we provide YAML manifests that enable these options when possible, using the specific options of various cloud providers.
The provided templates illustrate the setup for legacy in-tree service load balancer for AWS NLB.
AWS provides the documentation on how to use [Network load balancing on Amazon EKS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/network-load-balancing.html) with [AWS Load Balancer Controller](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-load-balancer-controller).
By default, TLS is terminated in the ingress controller. But it is also possible to terminate TLS in the Load Balancer. This section explains how to do that on AWS using an NLB.
1. Download the [deploy.yaml](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/controller-v1.2.0/deploy/static/provider/aws/nlb-with-tls-termination/deploy.yaml) template
Idle timeout value for TCP flows is 350 seconds and [cannot be modified](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/network/network-load-balancers.html#connection-idle-timeout).
For this reason, you need to ensure the [keepalive_timeout](https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#keepalive_timeout) value is configured less than 350 seconds to work as expected.
More information with regards to timeouts can be found in the [official AWS documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/network/network-load-balancers.html#connection-idle-timeout)
For private clusters, you will need to either add an additional firewall rule that allows master nodes access to port `8443/tcp` on worker nodes, or change the existing rule that allows access to ports `80/tcp`, `443/tcp` and `10254/tcp` to also allow access to port `8443/tcp`.
See the [GKE documentation](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/private-clusters#add_firewall_rules) on adding rules and the [Kubernetes issue](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/79739) for more detail.
More information with regards to Azure annotations for ingress controller can be found in the [official AKS documentation](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/ingress-internal-ip#create-an-ingress-controller).
The full list of annotations supported by Exoscale is available in the Exoscale Cloud Controller Manager [documentation](https://github.com/exoscale/exoscale-cloud-controller-manager/blob/master/docs/service-loadbalancer.md).
A [complete list of available annotations for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure](https://github.com/oracle/oci-cloud-controller-manager/blob/master/docs/load-balancer-annotations.md) can be found in the [OCI Cloud Controller Manager](https://github.com/oracle/oci-cloud-controller-manager) documentation.
This section is applicable to Kubernetes clusters deployed on bare metal servers, as well as "raw" VMs where Kubernetes was installed manually, using generic Linux distros (like CentOS, Ubuntu...)
For quick testing, you can use a [NodePort](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/#type-nodeport). This should work on almost every cluster, but it will typically use a port in the range 30000-32767.
For more information about bare metal deployments (and how to use port 80 instead of a random port in the 30000-32767 range), see [bare-metal considerations](./baremetal.md).
By default, the controller watches Ingress objects from all namespaces. If you want to change this behavior, use the flag `--watch-namespace` or check the Helm chart value `controller.scope` to limit the controller to a single namespace.
See also [“How to easily install multiple instances of the Ingress NGINX controller in the same cluster”](https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/#how-to-easily-install-multiple-instances-of-the-ingress-nginx-controller-in-the-same-cluster) for more details.
The controller uses an [admission webhook](https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/extensible-admission-controllers/) to validate Ingress definitions. Make sure that you don't have [Network policies](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/network-policies/) or additional firewalls preventing connections from the API server to the `ingress-nginx-controller-admission` service.
The first time the ingress controller starts, two [Jobs](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/jobs-run-to-completion/) create the SSL Certificate used by the admission webhook.
Ingress resources evolved over time. They started with `apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1`, then moved to `apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1` and more recently to `apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1`.
Here is how these Ingress versions are supported in Kubernetes:
- before Kubernetes 1.19, only `v1beta1` Ingress resources are supported
- from Kubernetes 1.19 to 1.21, both `v1beta1` and `v1` Ingress resources are supported
- in Kubernetes 1.22 and above, only `v1` Ingress resources are supported
And here is how these Ingress versions are supported in NGINX Ingress Controller:
- before version 1.0, only `v1beta1` Ingress resources are supported
- in version 1.0 and above, only `v1` Ingress resources are
As a result, if you're running Kubernetes 1.19 or later, you should be able to use the latest version of the NGINX Ingress Controller; but if you're using an old version of Kubernetes (1.18 or earlier) you will have to use version 0.X of the NGINX Ingress Controller (e.g. version 0.49).
The Helm chart of the NGINX Ingress Controller switched to version 1 in version 4 of the chart. In other words, if you're running Kubernetes 1.19 or earlier, you should use version 3.X of the chart (this can be done by adding `--version='<4'` to the `helm install` command).