tl;dr
Get the k8s node’s IP address (the one which runs the dashboard), with:
minikube dashboard --url
Use this IP and do a local port-forwarding, with:
ssh cgiehl@server -L 30000::30000
Today, I was trying out minikube, a simple way to setup a k8s „cluster“ locally and play around with it. Unfortunately, „locally“ didn’t quite work out for me since I was heavily running out of disk space 😀 I’ve heard a lot of ppl and their excitement about running minikube locally, but as soon as you ask them how to quickly run it on a server to mess around, it’s always the same: „On a server you want to setup kubernetes fully!“. Since this was not the answer I was looking for, I took a quick glimpse at my Ubuntu home-server in the corner and gave it a shot!
The installation was super easy and super fast (as expected), however, the moment the official docs stated:
To access the Kubernetes Dashboard, run this command in a shell after starting minikube to get the address:
minikube dashboard
Nothing openend in my SSH login shell 😉 Of course, you can enable X11-forwarding but since the dashboard is accessible via a browser, I wanted to use my local browser anyways. But…
What is the dashboard’s IP?
Now things get interesting and I want to show some ways on how to obtain them. The first thing I tried was
server:~ cgiehl$ kubectl get services --all-namespacesNAMESPACE NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
default kubernetes ClusterIP 10.0.0.1 <none> 443/TCP 41m
kube-system kube-dns ClusterIP 10.0.0.10 <none> 53/UDP,53/TCP 41m
kube-system kubernetes-dashboard NodePort 10.0.0.36 <none> 80:30000/TCP 41m
Now we have the exposed port running on 30000. Still we need the IP address!
A search in the repo gave me, that port 30000 is the default port, specified in the service.yaml.
server:~cgiehl$ kubectl describe nodes minikube
[...] Addresses: InternalIP: 192.168.99.100 Hostname: minikube [...]
After figuring that out, I thought this needs to be easier. It turned out, that there even exists a CLI flag for minikube dashboard it (idk since which version).
server:~ cgiehl$ minikube dashboard --url
which directly gives
http://192.168.99.100:30000