Calling the pods using pod's name instead of host and port

I'm running set of micro-services inside of a local minikube cluster (using helm charts) which communicate each other. Each and every service's host and port passed via value-dev.yaml to the other services and communication works fine. Now I need go bit of further, and alter connection calling from http://helm-chart-name:PORT/ to http://helm-chart-name/ or http://service-pod-name/. I tried to do this but it didn't work. Is there way to achieve this?

Solution

In your Services (specifically) set the port: number to 80. This is the default TCP port number for HTTP, so it's the port number that will get used if there's not a ...:12345 port number in a URL. The targetPort: needs to match whatever port the pod is listening on; it doesn't need to match the port:.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: {{ include "chart.fullname" . }}
spec:
  selector:
    {{- include "chart.selectorLabels" . | nindent 4 }}
  ports:
    - name: http
      protocol: TCP
      port: 80          # default HTTP port
      targetPort: 3000  # port number the matching Pod uses

Now other services can call http://helm-chart-name/ without explicitly giving a port number.

(You pretty much always need to use a Service to accept connections into a pod; you don't generally communicate directly to a pod, and aside from some specialized circumstances it's tricky to do so.)