How to access minikube dashboard from external browser, deployed on gcloud compute engine

Question

I created an ubuntu instance on gcloud and installed minikube and all the required dependency in it. Now I can do curl from gnode terminal "curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/http:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/" I get the HTML response back.

But I want to Access this URL from my Laptop browser. I tried opening these Ports in firewall of instance-node tcp:8080,8085,443,80,8005,8006,8007,8009,8009,8010,7990,7992,7993,7946,4789,2376,2377

But still unable to access the above mentioned url while replacing it with my external(39.103.89.09) IP i.e http://39.103.89.09:8080/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/http:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/

I believe I need to do some networking related changes but don't know what.

I am very new to Cloud computing and networking so please help me.

Answer 1

I suspect that minikube binds to the VM's localhost interface making it inaccessible from a remote machine.

There may be a way to run minikube such that it binds to 0.0.0.0 and then you may be able to use it remotely.

Alternatively, you can keep the firewall limited to e.g. 22 and use SSH to port-forward the VM's port 8080 to your localhost. `gcloud' includes a helper for this too:

1. Ensure minikube is running on the VM
2. gcloud compute ssh ${INSTANCE} --project=${PROJECT} --zone=${ZONE} --ssh-flag="-L 8080:localhost:8080"
3. Try accessing Kubernetes endpoints from your local machine using localhost:8080/api/v1/...

Update

OK, I created a Debian VM (n1-instance-2), installed docker and minikube.

SSH'd into the instance:

gcloud compute ssh ${INSTANCE} \
--zone=${ZONE} \
--project=${PROJECT}

Then minikube start

Then:

minikube kubectl -- get namespaces
NAME              STATUS   AGE
default           Active   14s
kube-node-lease   Active   16s
kube-public       Active   16s
kube-system       Active   16s

minikube appears (I'm unfamiliar it) to run as a Docker container called minikube and it exposes 4 ports to the VM's (!) localhost: 22,2376,5000,8443. The latter is key.

To determine the port mapping, either eyeball it:

docker container ls \
--filter=name=minikube \
--format="{{.Ports}}" \
| tr , \\n

Returns something like:

127.0.0.1:32771->22/tcp
127.0.0.1:32770->2376/tcp
127.0.0.1:32769->5000/tcp
127.0.0.1:32768->8443/tcp

In this case, the port we're interested in is 32768

Or:

docker container inspect minikube \
--format="{{ (index (index .NetworkSettings.Ports \"8443/tcp\") 0).HostPort }}"
32768

Then, exit the shell and return using --ssh-flag:

gcloud compute ssh ${INSTANCE} \
--zone=${ZONE} \
--project=${PROJECT} \
--ssh-flag="-L 8443:localhost:32768"

NOTE 8443 will be the port on the localhost; 32768 is the remote minikube port

Then, from another shell on your local machine (and while the port-forwarding ssh continues in the other shell), pull the ca.crt, client.key and client.crt:

gcloud compute scp \
$(whoami)@${INSTANCE}:./.minikube/profiles/minikube/client.* \
${PWD} \
--zone=${ZONE} \
--project=${PROJECT} 

gcloud compute scp \
$(whoami)@${INSTANCE}:./.minikube/ca.crt \
${PWD} \
--zone=${ZONE} \
--project=${PROJECT}

Now, create a config file, call it kubeconfig:

apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    certificate-authority: ./ca.crt
    server: https://localhost:8443
  name: minikube
contexts:
- context:
    cluster: minikube
    user: minikube
  name: minikube
current-context: minikube
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: minikube
  user:
    client-certificate: ./client.crt
    client-key: ./client.key

And, lastly:

KUBECONFIG=./kubeconfig kubectl get namespaces

Should yield:

NAME              STATUS   AGE
default           Active   23m
kube-node-lease   Active   23m
kube-public       Active   23m
kube-system       Active   23m