ngrok-controller, a Kubernetes Service Controller

Expose services in local kind, minikube, or actually any Kubernetes cluster you got running on your laptop via public endpoints provided by ngrok. The ngrok-controller facilitates as LoadBalancer service.

This project has been written in Typescript and uses the dot-i/k8s-operator, kubernetes/client-node, and ngrok modules.

Quick Walkthrough

Checkout the project:

$ git clone https://github.com/vasu1124/ngrok-controller.git
$ cd ngrok-controller

And deploy using skaffold:

$ skaffold run --tail

(if you wanted to debug, edit, and test the code in the cluster, you would run skaffold dev)

You can also use tilt, which is configured for debug, edit, and test mode:

$ tilt up
Tilt started on http://localhost:10350/
v0.30.7, built

(space) to open the browser
(s) to stream logs (--stream=true)
(t) to open legacy terminal mode (--legacy=true)
(ctrl-c) to exit

With tilt up, you should see output similar as above. Follow the instructions for tilt.

If you don't have a service to expose at hand use httbin, a kustomize template is provided (and is deployed in debug mode anyhow):

kubectl apply -k kubernetes/httpbin

Now patch the service resource with type: LoadBalancer and notice that the tunnel is created:

$ kubectl -n test patch service httpbin -p '{"spec":{"type":"LoadBalancer"}}'
service/httpbin patched

$ kubectl -n test describe service httpbin
Name:                     httpbin
Namespace:                test
Labels:                   app=httpbin
Annotations:              vasu1124/ngrok: http2
...
LoadBalancer Ingress:     e9da3abf0e68.eu.ngrok.io
...
Events:
  Type    Reason  Age    From                Message
  ----    ------  ----   ----                -------
  Normal  Type    2m59s  service-controller  LoadBalancer -> NodePort
  Normal  Type    49s    service-controller  NodePort -> LoadBalancer

$ kubectl -n ngrok-controller logs ngrok-controller-6c596bc8fd-4pgsk
[INFO] ngrok - { version: '0.0.1', log: 'info', interval: '60000' }
[INFO] ngrok - watching resource services.v1
[WARN] ngrok - connected
[INFO] ngrok - Ngroked: httpbin.test/10.104.55.133:8080 connected to https://e9da3abf0e68.eu.ngrok.io
[INFO] ngrok - Service status patched: httpbin.test

$ open https://e9da3abf0e68.eu.ngrok.io

In the above example you can now reach your local service endpoint via https://e9da3abf0e68.eu.ngrok.io:

The ngrok tunnel is established by spawning a process (ngrok binary) within the controller pod, which also exposes a monitor UI. You can access this UI easily with a port-forward:

$ kubectl -n ngrok-controller port-forward service/ngrok-monitor 4040
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:4040 -> 4040
Forwarding from [::1]:4040 -> 4040

$ open http://localhost:4040/status

Debugging in vscode is also possible, use the provided Attach to dev:start launch option in the Run and Debug section.