Portforward and Proxy

Portforward and Proxy

Forward a local port to a port on the Pod.

Start a whoami application by entering this command:

kubectl create deployment whoami --image=r.deso.tech/whoami/whoami --port=80

deployment.apps/whoami created

kubectl port-forward allows using resource name, such as a pod name, to select a matching pod to port forward to.

On the first terminal:

kubectl port-forward deployment/whoami 9000:80

Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:9000 -> 80
Forwarding from [::1]:9000 -> 80

Now open a second terminal on a student desktop and run curl:

curl localhost:9000

+-------------------------+
|        HOSTNAME         |
+-------------------------+
| whoami-5d6d99c644-b2vl5 |
+-------------------------+
+-------------------+-----------+
|        IP         | INTERFACE |
+-------------------+-----------+
| 127.0.0.1/8       | lo        |
| 192.168.39.194/32 | eth0      |
+-------------------+-----------+
+-------------------------+
|         REQUEST         |
+-------------------------+
| GET / HTTP/1.1 Host:    |
| localhost User-Agent:   |
| curl/7.64.1 Accept: */* |
|                         |
+-------------------------+

Now delete the deployment:

kubectl delete deploy whoami

deployment.apps "whoami" deleted

Using kubectl to start a proxy server

You can also use a proxy server to start a proxy to the Kubernetes API server:

From student desktop:

kubectl proxy --port=8080

Starting to serve on 127.0.0.1:8080

Do not close this terminal and open another terminal console. Now you can try curl and get responses from Kubernetes’ API server directly on your student desktop:

curl localhost:8080

{
  "paths": [
    "/api",
    "/api/v1",
    "/apis",
    "/apis/",
. . .
}