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Exposing the RHACS portal over HTTP

Enable an unencrypted HTTP server to expose the RHACS portal through ingress controllers, Layer 7 load balancers, Istio, or other solutions.

If you use an ingress controller, Istio, or a Layer 7 load balancer that prefers unencrypted HTTP back ends, you can configure Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes to expose the RHACS portal over HTTP. Doing this makes the RHACS portal available over a plaintext back end.

To expose the RHACS portal over HTTP, you must be using an ingress controller, a Layer 7 load balancer, or Istio to encrypt external traffic with HTTPS. It is insecure to expose the RHACS portal directly to external clients by using plain HTTP.

You can expose the RHACS portal over HTTP during installation or on an existing deployment.

Prerequisites

  • To specify an HTTP endpoint you must use an <endpoints_spec>. It is a comma-separated list of single endpoint specifications in the form of <type>@<addr>:<port>, where:

    • type is grpc or http. Using http as type works in most use cases. For advanced use cases, you can either use grpc or omit its value. If you omit the value for type, you can configure two endpoints in your proxy, one for gRPC and the other for HTTP. Both these endpoints point to the same exposed HTTP port on Central. However, most proxies do not support carrying both gRPC and HTTP traffic on the same external port.

    • addr is the IP address to expose Central on. You can omit this, or use localhost or 127.0.0.1 if you need an HTTP endpoint which is only accessible by using port-forwarding.

    • port is the port to expose Central on.

    • The following are several valid <endpoints_spec> values:

      • 8080

      • http@8080

      • :8081

      • grpc@:8081

      • localhost:8080

      • http@localhost:8080

      • http@8080,grpc@8081

      • 8080, grpc@:8081, http@0.0.0.0:8082

Exposing the RHACS portal over HTTP during the installation

If you are installing Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes using the roxctl CLI, use the --plaintext-endpoints option with the roxctl central generate interactive command to enable the HTTP server during the installation.

Procedure

  • Run the following command to specify an HTTP endpoint during the interactive installation process:

    $ roxctl central generate interactive \
  --plaintext-endpoints=<endpoints_spec> (1)
    1 Endpoint specifications in the form of <type>@<addr>:<port>. See the Prerequisites section for details.

Exposing the RHACS portal over HTTP for an existing desployment

You can enable the HTTP server on an existing Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes deployment.

Procedure

  1. Create a patch and define a ROX_PLAINTEXT_ENDPOINTS environment variable:

    $ CENTRAL_PLAINTEXT_PATCH='
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: central
        env:
        - name: ROX_PLAINTEXT_ENDPOINTS
          value: <endpoints_spec> (1)
'
    1 Endpoint specifications in the form of <type>@<addr>:<port>. See the Prerequisites section for details.

  2. Add the ROX_PLAINTEXT_ENDPOINTS environment variable to the Central deployment:

    $ oc -n stackrox patch deploy/central -p "$CENTRAL_PLAINTEXT_PATCH"