k8dash - Kubernetes Dashboard

k8dash is the easiest way to manage your Kubernetes cluster. Why?

• Full cluster management: Namespaces, Nodes, Pods, Replica Sets, Deployments, Storage, RBAC and more
• Blazing fast and Always Live: no need to refresh pages to see the latest
• Quickly visualize cluster health at a glance: Real time charts help quickly track down poorly performing resources
• Easy CRUD and scaling: plus inline API docs to easily understand what each field does
• 100% responsive (runs on your phone/tablet)
• Simple OpenID integration: no special proxies required
• Simple installation: use the provided yaml resources to have k8dash up and running in under 1 minute (no, seriously)

Click the video below to see k8dash in action

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Getting Started
• Kubectl proxy
• Logging in
  • Service Account Token
  • Running k8dash with OpenId Connect (oidc)
  • Running k8dash with NodePort
  • Metrics
• Development
  • Prerequisites
• Parts of k8dash
  • Server
  • Client
• License
  

Prerequisites

• A running Kubernetes cluster (e.g., minikube)
• metrics server installed (optional, but strongly recommended)
• A Kubernetes cluster configured for OpenId Connect authentication (optional)

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Getting Started

Deploy k8dash with something like the following...

NOTE: never trust a file downloaded from the internet. Make sure to review the contents of kubernetes-k8dash.yaml before running the script below.

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/indeedeng/k8dash/master/kubernetes-k8dash.yaml

To access k8dash, you must make it publicly visible. If you have an ingress server setup, you can accomplish by adding a route like the following

kind: Ingress
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: k8dash
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  rules:
  -
    host: k8dash.example.com
    http:
      paths:
      -
        path: /
        backend:
          serviceName: k8dash
          servicePort: 80

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kubectl proxy

Unfortunately, kubectl proxy can not be used to access k8dash. According to the information at https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/38775#issuecomment-277915961, it seems that kubectl proxy strips the Authorization header when it proxies requests. From that link:

this is working as expected. "proxying" through the apiserver will not get you standard proxy behavior (preserving Authorization headers end-to-end), because the API is not being used as a standard proxy

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Logging in

There are multiple options logging into the dashboard.

Service Account Token

The first (and easiest) option is to create a dedicated service account. The can be accomplished using the following script.

# Create the service account in the current namespace (we assume default)
kubectl create serviceaccount k8dash-sa

# Give that service account root on the cluster
kubectl create clusterrolebinding k8dash-sa --clusterrole=cluster-admin --serviceaccount=default:k8dash-sa

# Find the secret that was created to hold the token for the SA
kubectl get secrets

# Show the contents of the secret to extract the token
kubectl describe secret k8dash-sa-token-xxxxx

Retrieve the token value from the secret and enter it into the login screen to access the dashboard.

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Running k8dash with OpenId Connect (oidc)

k8dash makes using OpenId Connect for authentication easy. Assuming your cluster is configured to use OIDC, all you need to do is create a secret containing your credentials and run the kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml config.

To learn more about configuring a cluster for OIDC, check out these great links

• https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/authentication/
• https://medium.com/@mrbobbytables/kubernetes-day-2-operations-authn-authz-with-oidc-and-a-little-help-from-keycloak-de4ea1bdbbe
• https://medium.com/@int128/kubectl-with-openid-connect-43120b451672
• https://www.google.com/search?q=kubernetes+configure+oidc&oq=kubernetes+configure+oidc&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.4772j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

You can deploy k8dash with oidc support using something like the following script...

NOTE: never trust a file downloaded from the internet. Make sure to review the contents of kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml before running the script below.

OIDC_URL=<put your endpoint url here... something like https://accounts.google.com>
OIDC_ID=<put your id here... something like blah-blah-blah.apps.googleusercontent.com>
OIDC_SECRET=<put your oidc secret here>

kubectl create secret -n kube-system generic k8dash \
--from-literal=url="$OIDC_URL" \
--from-literal=id="$OIDC_ID" \
--from-literal=secret="$OIDC_SECRET"

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/indeedeng/k8dash/master/kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml

Additionally, there are a few other OIDC options you can provide via environment variables. First is OIDC_SCOPES. The default value for this value is openid email, but additional scopes can also be added using something like OIDC_SCOPES="openid email groups".

The other option is OIDC_METADATA. k8dash uses the excellent node-openid-client module. OIDC_METADATA will take a json string and pass it to the Client constructor. Docs here. For example, OIDC_METADATA='{"token_endpoint_auth_method":"client_secret_post"}

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Running k8dash with NodePort

If you do not have an ingress server setup, you can utilize a NodePort service as configured in the kubernetes-k8dash-nodeport.yaml. This is ideal when creating a single node master, or if you want to get up and running as fast as possible.

This will map the k8dash port 4654 to a randomly selected port on the running node. The assigned port can be found using

$ kubectl get svc --namespace=kube-system

NAME       TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE
k8dash     NodePort    10.107.107.62   <none>        4654:32565/TCP   1m

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Metrics

k8dash relies heavily on metrics-server to display real time cluster metrics. It is strongly recommended to have metrics-server installed to get the best experiance from k8dash.

• Installing metrics-server
• Running metrics-server with kubeadm

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Development

Prerequisites:

• A running Kubernetes cluster. Installing and running minikube is an easy way to get this. Once minikube is installed, you can run it with the command minikube start --driver=docker
• Once the cluster is up and running, create some login credentials as described above

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Parts of k8dash

Server

To run the server, run npm i from the /server directory to install dependencies and then npm start to run the server. The server is a simple express.js server that is primarily responsible for proxying requests to the Kubernetes api server.

During development, the server will use whatever is configured in ~/.kube/config to connect the desired cluster. If you are using minikube, for example, you can run kubectl config set-context minikube to get ~/.kube/config set up correctly.

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Client

The client is a React application (using TypeScript) with minimal other dependencies.

To run the client, open a new terminal tab and navigate to the /client directory, run npm i and then npm start. This will open up a browser window to your local k8dash dashboard. If everything compiles correctly, it will load the site and then an error message will pop up Unhandled Rejection (Error): Api request error: Forbidden.... The error message has an 'X' in the top righthand corner to close that message. After you close it, you should see the UI where you can enter your token.

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License

Apache License 2.0

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