Ingress to route gRPC calls and http calls

Question

I'm trying to write 2 ingress rules for my nginx ingress controller on my microk8s cluter:

• one to route all gRPC calls to a backend (the api service). The RPC paths all follow the pattern: /thing.v1.ThingService/AMethod, e.g: /pizzas.v1.PizzasService/ListFlavours
• one to route the rest of the traffic to the frontend (fe service)

This is what I have:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: fanout-ingress
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/force-ssl-redirect: 'true'
    cert-manager.io/issuer: letsencrypt-prod
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  rules:
  - host: dev.fancy.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: fe
            port:
              number: 80
  tls:
  - hosts:
    - dev.fancy.com
    secretName: letsencrypt-prod-tls

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: fanout-ingress-grpc
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/force-ssl-redirect: 'true'
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/backend-protocol: 'GRPC'
    cert-manager.io/issuer: letsencrypt-prod
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  rules:
  - host: dev.fancy.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: "/.*Service.*"
        pathType: ImplementationSpecific
        backend:
          service:
            name: api
            port:
              number: 8080
  tls:
  - hosts:
    - dev.fancy.com
    secretName: letsencrypt-prod-tls

In this configuration, calling /pizzas.v1.PizzasService/ListFlavours doesn't work, it returns a 404.

If I use this more specific config in the fanout-ingress-grpc rule, everything works:

    http:
      paths:
      - path: /pizzas.v1.PizzasService/ListFlavours"
        pathType: ImplementationSpecific

So it looks it's the regex that doesn't work. Could you give me any pointer please?

Answer 1

According to the documentation, You can use this annotation:

nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex: "true"