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
• 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

Prerequisites

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

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/herbrandson/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

kubectl proxy

Unfortunately, kubectl proxy can not be used to access k8dash. According to the information at kubernetes/kubernetes#38775 (comment), 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

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.

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/herbrandson/k8dash/master/kubernetes-k8dash-oidc.yaml

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

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

Development

K8dash is made up of 2 parts. The server and the client.

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.

Client

For the client, move to the /client directory, run npm i and then npm start. The client is a React application with minimal other dependencies.

License

Apache License 2.0