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

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:
Ensure minikube is running on the VM
gcloud compute ssh ${INSTANCE} --project=${PROJECT} --zone=${ZONE} --ssh-flag="-L 8080:localhost:8080"
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