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Using port forwarding to access applications in a container

You can configure port forwarding to pods, which expose services in your cluster to clients outside of the cluster.

Understand port forwarding​

You can use the OpenShift CLI (oc) to forward one or more local ports to a pod. This allows you to listen on a given or random port locally, and have data forwarded to and from given ports in the pod.

You can use a command similar to the following to forward one or more local ports to a pod.

$ oc port-forward <pod> [<local_port>:]<remote_port> [...[<local_port_n>:]<remote_port_n>]

The OpenShift CLI (oc) listens on each local port specified by the user, forwarding using the protocol described below.

You can specify ports by using the following formats:

5000
The client listens on port 5000 locally and forwards to 5000 in the pod.
6000:5000
The client listens on port 6000 locally and forwards to 5000 in the pod.
:5000 or 0:5000
The client selects a free local port and forwards to 5000 in the pod.

OpenShift Container Platform handles port-forward requests from clients. Upon receiving a request, OpenShift Container Platform upgrades the response and waits for the client to create port-forwarding streams. When OpenShift Container Platform receives a new stream, it copies data between the stream and the pod’s port.

Architecturally, there are options for forwarding to a pod’s port. The supported OpenShift Container Platform implementation invokes nsenter directly on the node host to enter the pod’s network namespace, then invokes socat to copy data between the stream and the pod’s port. However, a custom implementation could include running a helper pod that then runs nsenter and socat, so that those binaries are not required to be installed on the host.

Use port forwarding​

You can use the OpenShift CLI (oc) to port-forward one or more local ports to a pod.

Procedure

  • Use a command similar to the following to listen on the specified port in a pod:

    $ oc port-forward <pod> [<local_port>:]<remote_port> [...[<local_port_n>:]<remote_port_n>]

    For example, use the following command to listen on ports 5000 and 6000 locally and forward data to and from ports 5000 and 6000 in the pod:

    $ oc port-forward <pod> 5000 6000
    Example output
    Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:5000 -> 5000
    Forwarding from [::1]:5000 -> 5000
    Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:6000 -> 6000
    Forwarding from [::1]:6000 -> 6000

    For example, use the following command to listen on port 8888 locally and forward to 5000 in the pod:

    $ oc port-forward <pod> 8888:5000
    Example output
    Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:8888 -> 5000
    Forwarding from [::1]:8888 -> 5000

    For example, use the following command to listen on a free port locally and forward to 5000 in the pod:

    $ oc port-forward <pod> :5000
    Example output
    Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:42390 -> 5000
    Forwarding from [::1]:42390 -> 5000

    Alternatively, use the following command to listen on a free port locally and forward to 5000 in the pod:

    $ oc port-forward <pod> 0:5000

Protocol for initiating port forwarding from a client​

A client resource in your cluster can initiate port forwarding to a pod by issuing a request to the Kubernetes API server.

Use a request in the following format:

/proxy/nodes/<node_name>/portForward/<namespace>/<pod>

where:

<node_name>
Specifies the FQDN of the node.
<namespace>
Specifies the namespace of the target pod.
<pod>
Specifies the name of the target pod.
Example request
/proxy/nodes/node123.openshift.com/portForward/myns/mypod

After sending a port forward request to the API server, the client upgrades the connection to one that supports multiplexed streams. For more information about the current implementation, see "Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)".

The client creates a stream with the port header containing the target port in the pod. All data written to the stream is delivered via the kubelet to the target pod and port. Similarly, all data sent from the pod for that forwarded connection is delivered back to the same stream in the client.

The client closes all streams, the upgraded connection, and the underlying connection when it is finished with the port forwarding request.

Additional resources