Cloud-Native Deployment with Helm

Helm is a package management system for automating the management and release of Kubernetes software. With Helm, you can quickly deploy and install Higress gateway on your Kubernetes cluster.

Installing Higress

The Higress gateway consists of the control plane component higress-controller and the data plane component higress-gateway. higress-gateway is responsible for handling data traffic, while higress-controller is responsible for managing configuration distribution.

Helm Installation Command

helm repo add higress.io https://higress.io/helm-charts
helm install higress higress.io/higress -n higress-system --create-namespace

Common Installation Parameters

For a complete parameter description, please check the Operations Parameters Documentation

Parameter Name	Description	Default Value
Global Parameters
global.local	If installing to a local K8s cluster (such as Kind, Rancher Desktop, etc.), set this to `true`	false
global.ingressClass	IngressClass used to filter Ingress resources monitored by Higress Controller. When multiple gateways are deployed in a cluster, this parameter can be used to distinguish the responsibilities of each gateway. IngressClass has some special values: 1. If set to “nginx”, Higress Controller will monitor Ingress resources with either `nginx` or empty IngressClass. 2. If set to empty, Higress Controller will monitor all Ingress resources in the K8s cluster.	higress
global.watchNamespace	If not empty, Higress Controller will only monitor resources in the specified namespace. When business systems are isolated by K8s namespaces and each namespace needs an independent gateway, this parameter can be used to limit Higress to monitor Ingress in the specified namespace.	""
global.disableAlpnH2	Whether to disable HTTP/2 protocol in ALPN	false
global.enableStatus	If `true`, Higress Controller will update the `status` field of Ingress resources. To avoid overwriting the `status` field of Ingress objects during migration from Nginx Ingress, this parameter can be set to `false`, so Higress will not write the ingress IP to the `status` field of Ingress by default.	true
global.enableIstioAPI	If `true`, Higress Controller will also monitor istio resources	false
global.enableGatewayAPI	If `true`, Higress Controller will also monitor Gateway API resources	false
global.onlyPushRouteCluster	If `true`, Higress Controller will only push services associated with routes	true
global.o11y.enabled	If `true`, will also install observability suite (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, PromTail)	false
global.pvc.rwxSupported	Indicates whether the target K8s cluster supports ReadWriteMany operation mode for PersistentVolumeClaim.	true
Core Component Parameters
higress-core.gateway.replicas	Number of Higress Gateway pods	2
higress-core.gateway.httpPort	HTTP port that Higress Gateway will listen on	80
higress-core.gateway.httpsPort	HTTPS port that Higress Gateway will listen on	443
higress-core.gateway.kind	Resource type used to deploy Higress Gateway, Deployment or DaemonSet	Deployment
higress-core.controller.replicas	Number of Higress Controller pods	1
Console Parameters
higress-console.replicaCount	Number of Higress Console pods	1
higress-console.service.type	K8s Service type used by Higress Console	ClusterIP
higress-console.web.login.prompt	Prompt message displayed on the login page	""

Supporting Istio CRD (Optional)

The cluster needs to have Istio CRDs installed in advance. If you don’t want to install Istio, you can also just install Istio CRDs:

helm repo add istio https://istio-release.storage.googleapis.com/charts
helm install istio-base istio/base -n istio-system --create-namespace

In this mode, you need to update Higress deployment parameters:

helm upgrade higress -n higress-system --set global.enableIstioAPI=true higress.io/higress --reuse-values

Supporting Gateway API CRD (Optional)

The cluster needs to have Gateway API CRDs installed in advance: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/releases

For example, for version 1.0.0:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/releases/download/v1.0.0/experimental-install.yaml

In this mode, you need to update Higress deployment parameters:

helm upgrade higress -n higress-system --set global.enableGatewayAPI=true higress.io/higress --reuse-values

You can use this configuration to verify Gateway API functionality:

https://github.com/alibaba/higress/blob/main/samples/gateway-api/demo.yaml