Install an Ingress Controller

This guide shows you how to install an ingress controller so the platform’s services are reachable from outside the cluster, and what to add to your hosts file when running locally.

Type

How-to guide

Goal

Make the platform’s services reachable from outside the Kubernetes cluster.

Audience

Platform Operator with Helm access to the cluster.

When to use

Use this guide once per cluster, before installing the platform.

Reaching the services in a Kubernetes cluster from outside it requires an ingress controller. The commands below install one. Values in angle brackets, such as <INGRESS_NGINX_VERSION>, are placeholders: replace them before you run the command.

The community-maintained ingress-nginx controller was deprecated in March 2026. Axual has migrated all managed clusters to a supported controller, and the move to the Kubernetes Gateway API, the native Kubernetes ingress solution, is the next planned step. The instructions below describe the previous setup and are kept for reference. Contact your Axual representative for the ingress configuration to use when setting up a new environment.

Add the ingress-nginx Helm repository. This is needed once per machine.
```
helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
```

Start ingress-nginx.

The command below starts nginx without requiring a class on the ingress resources, and with SSL passthrough enabled.

helm install ingress-controller ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx \
  --version <INGRESS_NGINX_VERSION> \
  --namespace ingress-nginx \
  --create-namespace \
  --set controller.watchIngressWithoutClass="true" \
  --set controller.extraArgs.enable-ssl-passthrough="true"

The command creates a Service of type LoadBalancer. On a local cluster whose tool does not assign external addresses automatically, its EXTERNAL-IP field stays PENDING until that tool’s tunnel or proxy process runs.

When running locally, add <domain> and axual.<domain> to /etc/hosts. Replace <domain> with the domain you use for the Axual Governance deployment.
```
127.0.0.1 <domain> axual.<domain>
```