Nginx ingress controller websocket support

Question

Recently I've been working on a toy app using Kubernetes. Part of the app is a web server that needs to support WebSockets. Currently, I'm using port-forwarding to access the web server and everything works just fine.

I'd like to switch to using an Ingress and IngressController to avoid using the port forwarding.

Here is my Ingress config:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: app-ingress
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/force-ssl-redirect: "true"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/secure-backends: "true"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-send-timeout: "3600"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-read-timeout: "3600"
spec:
  rules:
  - http:
      paths:
      - path: /app
        backend:
          serviceName: web-svc
          servicePort: 3030
      - path: /ws
        backend:
          serviceName: web-svc
          servicePort: 3030

Now accessing the app through $(minikube ip)/app works just fine, but the WebSocket requests all fail because nginx is returning a 200 and not a 101.

I've tried adding the nginx.org/websocket-services annotation but that doesn't seem to be working either.

Has anyone encountered a similar situation?

Cheers

Answer 1

From looking at the nginx ingress controller docs and the nginx docs you probably need something like this as an annotation on your Kubernetes Ingress:

nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/configuration-snippet: |
   proxy_http_version 1.1;
   proxy_set_header Upgrade "websocket";
   proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";

Note that once you add that annotation all of your Ingress rules will have that snippet in the location block in your nginx configs. So if you want to ignore it for other rules you will have to create a separate Kubernetes Ingress.

EDIT:

As per the gist and the Nginx ingress docs 📄, it seems like this annotation fixed the problem:

nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-read-timeout: 3600
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-send-timeout: 3600

Answer 2

Theese worked for me.

It seems they added support via annotation (example in docs):

nginx.org/websocket-services: "service1[,service2,...]"

I tested my connection with telsocket, small tool to connect to a WS/WSS socket.

There are all sorts of different clients, this might also help finding the culprit with the connection.

Important to note: two nginx ingress controllers are available, more info here.

This answer is limited to the nginxinc version, that is different that used in the question, the accepted answer is the only solution as of right now.