Exposing the ingress-nginx controller with a LoadBalancer service in RKE1 and RKE2 Kubernetes Clusters

An RKE or RKE2 cluster deployed with the bundled ingress-nginx ingress controller

This knowledge base article provides instructions on configuring the ingress controller in Rancher RKE1 and RKE2 Kubernetes clusters to be exposed through a LoadBalancer service instead of the default host ports 80 and 443 on worker nodes. This is particularly useful when running a Kubernetes cluster on a cloud provider that supports automatic configuration and management of LoadBalancer services through Kubernetes's cloud provider integration.

Exposing the Ingress Controller with a LoadBalancer Service in:

RKE1:

In RKE1, it is not possible to directly configure the ingress-nginx controller with a LoadBalancer service through the ingress options in the cluster configuration. However, you can manually create a LoadBalancer service as shown below:

apiVersion: v1 
kind: Service 
metadata: 
  name: ingress-nginx-lb 
  namespace: ingress-nginx 
spec: 
  ports: 
    - name: http 
      port: 80 
      protocol: TCP 
      targetPort: 80 
    - name: https 
      port: 443 
      protocol: TCP 
      targetPort: 443 
  selector: 
    app: ingress-nginx 
  type: LoadBalancer 

This will create a LoadBalancer service named "ingress-nginx-lb" in the "ingress-nginx" namespace, exposing ports 80 and 443.

This LoadBalancer service manifest can be added to the cluster via the user addons configuration, as documented at https://rke.docs.rancher.com/config-options/add-ons/user-defined-add-ons, to manage and deploy it alongside the cluster components/upgrades.

RKE2:

In RKE2, the ingress-nginx controller is managed through a Helm chart, allowing configuration changes using a HelmChartConfig resource. For more information see the following - https://docs.rke2.io/helm#customizing-packaged-components-with-helmchartconfig. Here is an example below of how to achieve this configuration.

apiVersion: helm.cattle.io/v1 
kind: HelmChartConfig 
metadata: 
  name: rke2-ingress-nginx 
  namespace: kube-system 
spec: 
  valuesContent: |- 
    controller:       
      hostPort: 
        enabled: false 
      service: 
        enabled: true 
        type: LoadBalancer 

This configuration sets the "type" of the nginx ingress controller service to LoadBalancer, allowing it to be exposed through a cloud LoadBalancer.

For standalone RKE2 clusters, this HelmChartConfig manifest can be defined within the manifests directory on server nodes, as documented at https://docs.rke2.io/helm#customizing-packaged-components-with-helmchartconfig.

For Rancher-provisioned RKE2 clusters, this HelmChartConfig manifest can be defined within the cluster configuration under 'Additional Manifest'.