Determine Kubernetes Node IP Address

Under development environment, you might want to debug or test some containers by adding Service with NodePort but you don’t know how to access it. Well, I will show you how to determine Kubernetes node IP address for this particular usecase.

You might also want to read my complete guide to setup Kubernetes for development.

Kubernetes Node IP Address

Let say we have a web service container, we want to expose and test it in web browser, this is what our template might look like:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
    name: web-service-local
spec:
    type: NodePort
    ports:
        - port: 4000
          targetPort: 8080
          nodePort: 9000
    selector:
        app: backend

The backend web service container runs on port 8080 inside its pod, and we want it to be accessible on browser via nodePort: 9000. The question here is, “what is the domain name or IP address should we type in browser to access?”

Let’s dig out some IP addresses that we can try out.

Start first with the web backend pod:

$ kubectl get pods -o wide
NAME         READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP          NODE             NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
web-backend   1/1     Running   0          31s   10.1.0.13   docker-desktop   <none>           <none>

Try to access it via browser with http://10.1.0.13:9000 , it doesn’t work. Why?

Well, the pod is isolated, and certainly you cannot access it directly. The only way to access it is to create a Service resource and forward the network connection. That explains why we have to create web-service-local Service at the beginning.

Let see something about service then:

$ kubectl get service -o wide
NAME               TYPE        CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE     SELECTOR
web-service-local   NodePort    10.108.148.158   <none>        4000:9000/TCP   4m30s   app=backend

Ah ha, new IP address, try it out in browser http://10.108.148.158:9000 , and it’s not going to work again.

Alright, here is the correct IP address.

Because we are trying to expose it via NodePort, implicitly, it means the node that pod is running on inside the cluster, so we should find the Node IP address and use it.

Let see some information about the nodes:

$ kubectl get nodes -o wide
NAME       STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION   INTERNAL-IP    EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE              KERNEL-VERSION   CONTAINER-RUNTIME
minikube   Ready    master   4h55m   v1.17.3   192.168.64.4   <none>        Buildroot 2019.02.9   4.19.94          docker://19.3.6

The IP address is 192.168.64.4 , this should be the same as IP address of the cluster managed by minikube.

$ kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes master is running at https://192.168.64.4:8443
KubeDNS is running at https://192.168.64.4:8443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy

It can also be retrieved via this command:

$ minikube ip
192.168.64.4

If you type into browser the location: http://192.168.64.4:9000 , it should work fine now.

However, it is a little bit different if using docker-desktop , which is setup by Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows (I think).

The result is a bit different, and here they are:

$ kubectl get nodes -o wide
NAME             STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION   INTERNAL-IP    EXTERNAL-IP   OS-IMAGE         KERNEL-VERSION     CONTAINER-RUNTIME
docker-desktop   Ready    master   46h   v1.15.5   192.168.65.3   <none>        Docker Desktop   4.19.76-linuxkit   docker://19.3.5

$ kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes master is running at https://kubernetes.docker.internal:6443
KubeDNS is running at https://kubernetes.docker.internal:6443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy

$ cat /etc/hosts
# Added by Docker Desktop
# To allow the same kube context to work on the host and the container:
127.0.0.1 kubernetes.docker.internal

They are not the same, right?

The thing is that Docker desktop version setup the cluster directly into your OS, not using any extra VM like minikube . Therefore, what you need to do whenever you need to access your local node is to use the IP address configured inside /etc/hosts to access your node.

That’s it! No more trouble finding the correct Kubernetes node IP address in development.