Gloo Gateway as an Ingress Controller

Gloo Gateway can be used as a simple ingress controller on Kubernetes. This guide will take you through the process of deploying Gloo Gateway as an ingress controller using either glooctl or Helm.

These directions assume you’ve prepared your Kubernetes cluster appropriately. Full details on setting up your Kubernetes cluster here.

Installing on Kubernetes with glooctl

Before you begin, make sure that you install glooctl, the Gloo Gateway command line tool (CLI).

Once your Kubernetes cluster is up and running, run the following command to deploy the Gloo Gateway Ingress Controller to the gloo-system namespace:

glooctl install ingress

Installing on Kubernetes with Helm

This is the recommended method for installing Gloo Gateway to your production environment as it offers rich customization to the Gloo Gateway control plane and the proxies Gloo Gateway manages. This guide assumes that you are using Helm version 3, and have already installed the Helm client on your local machine.

As a first step, you have to add the Gloo Gateway repository to the list of known chart repositories and update the repository:

helm repo add gloo https://storage.googleapis.com/solo-public-helm
helm repo update

In the values for the Helm chart, you are going to set gateway.enabled to false and ingress.enabled to true. You can do this either by creating a values.yaml file with the proper settings or by defining the settings in line.

Install using a values.yaml file

If you would like to define the settings with a file, create a values.yaml file with the following overrides:

gateway:
  enabled: false
ingress:
  enabled: true

Then install Gloo Gateway using the following command:

helm install gloo gloo/gloo --namespace gloo-system --create-namespace -f values.yaml

Gloo Gateway can be installed to a namespace of your choosing with the --namespace flag.

Install using in-line settings

Instead of creating a values.yaml file, you can simply define the settings in-line. This is useful for a small number of values, but quickly becomes impractical if you want to override several values.

Run the following commands to install the Gloo Gateway ingress controller.

helm install gloo gloo/gloo --namespace gloo-system --create-namespace \
  --set gateway.enabled=false,ingress.enabled=true

Verify your Installation

Check that the Gloo Gateway pods and services have been created. Depending on your install option, you may see some differences from the following example. And if you chose to install Gloo Gateway into a different namespace than the default gloo-system, you will need to query your chosen namespace instead.

kubectl get all -n gloo-system

NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/ingress-proxy-6d786fd9f-4k5r4          1/1     Running   0          64s
pod/discovery-55b8645d77-72mbt             1/1     Running   0          63s
pod/gloo-9f9f77c8d-6sk7z                   1/1     Running   0          64s
pod/ingress-85ffc7b77b-z6lsm               1/1     Running   0          64s

NAME                           TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP       PORT(S)                      AGE
service/ingress-proxy          LoadBalancer   10.7.250.225   35.226.24.166     80:32436/TCP,443:32667/TCP   64s
service/gloo                   ClusterIP      10.7.251.47    <none>            9977/TCP                     4d10h

NAME                                   DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/ingress-proxy          1         1         1            1           64s
deployment.apps/discovery              1         1         1            1           63s
deployment.apps/gloo                   1         1         1            1           64s
deployment.apps/ingress                1         1         1            1           64s

NAME                                             DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
replicaset.apps/ingress-proxy-6d786fd9f          1         1         1       64s
replicaset.apps/discovery-55b8645d77             1         1         1       63s
replicaset.apps/gloo-9f9f77c8d                   1         1         1       64s
replicaset.apps/ingress-85ffc7b77b               1         1         1       64s

Uninstall

To uninstall Gloo Gateway and all related components, simply run the following.

glooctl uninstall

If you installed Gloo Gateway to a different namespace, you will have to specify that namespace using the -n option:

glooctl uninstall -n my-namespace

Next Steps

To begin using Gloo Gateway with the Kubernetes Ingress API, check out the Ingress Controller guide.