NGINX Ingress Operator

The NGINX Ingress Operator is a Kubernetes/OpenShift component which deploys and manages one or more NGINX/NGINX Plus Ingress Controllers which in turn handle Ingress traffic for applications running in a cluster.

Learn more about operators in the Kubernetes Documentation.

To install a specific version of the NGINX Ingress Controller with the operator, a specific version of the NGINX Ingress Operator is required.

Up until version 0.5.1, this Operator was Go based. Version 1.0.0 marks an incompatible upgrade as this release switched the Operator to being Helm-based, built from the NGINX Ingress Controller Helm chart. The configuration for the Helm chart can be seen in the NGINX Ingress Controller documentation.

The following table shows the relation between the versions of the two projects:

NGINX Ingress Controller	NGINX Ingress Operator
4.0.x	3.0.0
3.7.x	2.4.2
3.6.x	2.3.2
3.5.x	2.2.2
3.4.x	2.1.2
3.3.x	2.0.2
3.2.x	1.5.2
3.1.x	1.4.2
3.0.x	1.3.1
2.4.x	1.2.1
2.3.x	1.1.0
2.2.x	1.0.0
2.1.x	0.5.1
2.0.x	0.4.0
1.12.x	0.3.0
1.11.x	0.2.0
1.10.x	0.1.0
1.9.x	0.0.7
1.8.x	0.0.6
1.7.x	0.0.4
< 1.7.0	N/A

Note: The NGINX Ingress Operator works only for NGINX Ingress Controller versions after 1.7.0.

Getting Started

Install the NGINX Ingress Operator. See docs.
NOTE: To use TransportServers as part of your NGINX Ingress Controller configuration, a GlobalConfiguration resource must be created before starting the Operator - see the notes
Creating the default-server-secret.yaml is optional and it is recommended that users provide their own certificate. An example yaml for this can be found in the examples folder
(If using OpenShift) Create the scc resource on the cluster by applying the scc.yaml file found in the resources folder of this repo:
```
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nginxinc/nginx-ingress-helm-operator/main/resources/scc.yaml
```
Deploy a new NGINX Ingress Controller using the NginxIngress Custom Resource:
- Use the name of the default server secret created above for controller.defaultTLS.secret field (needs to be in the form namespace/name)
- If using NGINX Plus:
  - Set the controller.nginxPlus to true
  - Set the controller.image.repository and controller.image.tag to the appropriate values
  - Set the controller.serviceAccount.imagePullSecretName if applicable
- For full configuration details see the Helm documentation here.

Notes: Multiple NIC Deployments

Please see the NGINX Ingress Controller documentation for general information on running multiple NGINX Ingress Controllers in your cluster.
To run multiple NIC instances deployed by the NGINX Ingress Operator in your cluster in the same namespace, rbac.create should be set to false, and the ServiceAccount and ClusterRoleBinding need to be created independently of the deployments. Please note that controller.serviceAccount.imagePullSecretName will also be ignored in this configuration, and will need to be configured as part of the independent ServiceAccount creation.
The ClusterRoleBinding needs to configured to bind to the nginx-ingress-operator-nginx-ingress-admin ClusterRole.
See RBAC example spec for an example ServiceAccount and ClusterRoleBinding manifest.
To run multiple NIC instances deployed by the NGINX Ingress Operator in your cluster in any namespace but sharing an IngressClass, controller.ingressClass.name should be set to an empty string and the IngressClass resource needs to be created independently of the deployments.Please note that controller.ingressClass.setAsDefaultIngress will also be ignored in this configuration, and will need to be configured as part of the independent IngressClass creation.
See IngressClass example spec for an example IngressClass manifest.

Upgrades

See upgrade docs