Installing Ingress-Nginx Controller with Helm

In my previous post, I showed how to install helm CLI on a server/instance running AlmaLinux 9. Now, I will share how to use helm to install the Ingress-Nginx Controller for a Kubernetes cluster.

We install a package known as “chart” from a Helm repository. Initially, there is no repo, and can be seen below:

$ helm repo list
Error: no repositories to show

In order to install Ingress-Nginx Controller, I first need to add a new repository.

$ helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
"ingress-nginx" has been added to your repositories

$ helm repo list
NAME            URL
ingress-nginx   https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx

Also, before we install a chart from a repo, it’s a good idea to update the chat repo too.

$ helm repo update
Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
...Successfully got an update from the "ingress-nginx" chart repository
Update Complete. ⎈Happy Helming!⎈

Now, we’re ready to install an Nginx chart. The command below was copied from the Quick start page of Ingress-Nginx Controller.

$ helm upgrade --install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx \
  --repo https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx \
  --namespace ingress-nginx --create-namespace

Or using an slighty different command (since we already configured a repo above):

$ helm upgrade --install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx \
  --namespace ingress-nginx --create-namespace

A brief explanation of what the above command actually does. helm will upgrade an existing ingress-nginx if it were already installed, otherwise it will be intalled it. The first ingress-nginx is a custom relase name, we can pick a different name. --namespace ingress-nginx will install this chart in its own namespace called ingress-nginx, and this name space will be created if it doesn’t exist.

Check the status of the ingress help deployment using the following command:

$ helm ls -n ingress-nginx
NAME            NAMESPACE       REVISION        UPDATED                                         STATUS          CHART                   APP VERSION
ingress-nginx   ingress-nginx   1               2023-09-26 22:56:27.274774743 +1000 AEST        deployed        ingress-nginx-4.8.0     1.9.0

We can check the deployment using kubectl command. Remember, the chart was deployed into ingress-nginx namespace, hence it’s necessary to add -n ingress-nginx to both helm and kubectl commands.

$ kubectl get deployments -n ingress-nginx
NAME                       READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
ingress-nginx-controller   1/1     1            1           4m3s

Optionally, to remove the deployment, we can use the following command.

$ helm uninstall ingress-controller

References: