I'm running an Nginx Ingress Controller installed via Helm on my Kubernetes cluster. I would like to change the HTML/CSS in the default backend service for some specific errors (e.g. 404).
This link provides some general information about the default backend. However, there is no mention of how to actually customize the served HTML/CSS files.
The original answer contains the steps necessary to deploy a custom default backend on kubernetes.
However, the newest version of ingress-nginx allows the user to only specify the docker image to pull - no need for other k8s resource files (i.e. service and deployment).
My current values.yaml
which I'm using for the nginx ingress controller to allow a custom default backend:
defaultBackend:
enabled: true
name: custom-default-backend
image:
repository: dvdblk/custom-default-backend
tag: "latest"
pullPolicy: Always
port: 8080
extraVolumeMounts:
- name: tmp
mountPath: /tmp
extraVolumes:
- name: tmp
emptyDir: {}
Here is the GitHub repo of the custom backend.
Alright, some parts of these answers were helpful on the hunt for the complete solution, especially the one from @Matt. However, it took me quite some time to get this working so I've decided to write my own answer with all the necessary details that others might struggle with as well.
The first thing would be to create a Docker image server capable of responding to any request with 404 content, except /healthz
and /metrics
. As @Matt mentioned this could be an Nginx instance (which I've used). To sum up:
/healthz
should return 200
/metrics
is optional, but it should return data that is readable by Prometheus in case you are using it for k8s metrics. Nginx can provide some basic data that Prometheus can read. Consider this link if you would like to get the full Prometheus integration with Nginx./
returns a 404 with your custom HTML content.Thus, the Dockerfile
looks like this:
FROM nginx:alpine
# Remove default NGINX Config
# Take care of Nginx logging
RUN rm /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf && \
ln -sf /dev/stdout /var/log/nginx/access.log && \
ln -sf /dev/stderr /var/log/nginx/error.log
# NGINX Config
COPY ./default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
# Resources
COPY content/ /var/www/html/
CMD ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"]
In the same folder where Dockerfile is located, create this default.conf
Nginx configuration file:
server {
root /var/www/html;
index 404.html;
location / {
}
location /healthz {
access_log off;
return 200 "healthy\n";
}
location /metrics {
# This creates a readable and somewhat useful response for Prometheus
stub_status on;
}
error_page 404 /404.html;
location = /404.html {
internal;
}
}
At last, provide a content/404.html
file with HTML/CSS to your own liking.
Now build the Docker image with:
docker build --no-cache -t custom-default-backend .
Tag this image so that it is ready to be pushed into DockerHub (or your own private docker registry):
docker tag custom-default-backend:latest <your_dockerhub_username>/custom-default-backend
Push the image to a DockerHub repository:
docker push <your_dockerhub_username>/custom-default-backend
Now comes the part of integrating this custom-default-backend image into the Helm installation. In order to do this, we first need to create this k8s resource file (custom_default_backend.yaml
):
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: custom-default-backend
namespace: ingress-nginx
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: custom-default-backend
app.kubernetes.io/part-of: ingress-nginx
spec:
selector:
app.kubernetes.io/name: custom-default-backend
app.kubernetes.io/part-of: ingress-nginx
ports:
- port: 80
targetPort: 80
name: http
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: custom-default-backend
namespace: ingress-nginx
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: custom-default-backend
app.kubernetes.io/part-of: ingress-nginx
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: custom-default-backend
app.kubernetes.io/part-of: ingress-nginx
template:
metadata:
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/name: custom-default-backend
app.kubernetes.io/part-of: ingress-nginx
spec:
containers:
- name: custom-default-backend
# Don't forget to edit the line below
image: <your_dockerhub_username>/custom-default-backend:latest
imagePullPolicy: Always
ports:
- containerPort: 80
Assuming we have a k8s namespace ingress-nginx
already created we can create these two resources.
kubectl apply -f custom_default_backend.yaml
Now in order to tie the Nginx Ingress Controller with our new service, we could probably just edit the deployment of the Ingress Controller. But I've decided to remove it completely via Helm:
helm delete nginx-ingress -n ingress-nginx
And install it again with this command (make sure you have the --set
flag with proper arguments included):
helm install nginx-ingress --namespace ingress-nginx stable/nginx-ingress --set defaultBackend.enabled=false,controller.defaultBackendService=ingress-nginx/custom-default-backend
With these steps you should end up with a working custom default backend implementation. Here is a GitHub repo with the files that I have used in this answer.