Is there a way to access kubernetes dashboard by passing token on the url?

Question

I am able to access my kubernetes dashoard UI by accessing below url and providing the token and hitting sign in button on the login screen

http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/#/workloads?namespace=default

Is there a way I can pass the token via the URL itself so the Dashboard UI opens in logged in state so i don't need to manually past the token and hit sign in?

I am looking for something like this (which was suggested by ChatGPT which unfortunately didn't work, this just opens the login screen again) :

http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/?token=<authentication-token>

Are you looking to access the UI by using the token in the URL or are you going to use the dashboard API with curl. — Dharani Dhar Golladasari, Dec 23 '22 at 10:31
Maybe this answer helps? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46664104/how-to-sign-in-kubernetes-dashboard — lapadets, Dec 23 '22 at 11:14
No it doesn't. My question is about launching the dashboard in a logged in state. Which they haven't addressed — anandhu, Dec 23 '22 at 11:19
yeah, I am not sure that is possible... I've used Postman in the past with an `Authorization: Bearer ` header and works, but it's not the ui in browser. Can you try to name your query param `?bearer-token=` instead? I am not sure if works thouth, just an idea. — lapadets, Dec 23 '22 at 11:21

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 23 '22 at 13:35

We can access the kubernetes dashboard UI by two ways

Bearer token
KubeConfig

As to answer your question, we can't login by encoding the token in the URL. But we can use Skip option to avoid giving the token every time we login.

To enable the Skip button to appear in UI we need to add following flags in the dashboard deployment under args section

--enable-skip-login
--disable-settings-authorizer

After adding these flags the deployment looks something like this

spec:
      containers:
      - name: kubernetes-dashboard
        image: k8s.gcr.io/kubernetes-dashboard-amd64:v1.10.1
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8443
          protocol: TCP
        args:
          - --enable-skip-login
          - --disable-settings-authorizer        
          - --auto-generate-certificates
          
          # If not specified, Dashboard will attempt to auto discover the API server and connect
          # to it. Uncomment only if the default does not work.
          # - --apiserver-host=http://my-address:port
        volumeMounts:

Now when you redeploy the dashboard you are able to see the Skip button. By skipping the login will save a lot of time when testing locally deployed clusters.

Note: This is not a suggested method in terms of security standpoint. However, if you are deploying in an isolated testing environment you can proceed with the above steps.

For more information refer this link

Is there a way to access kubernetes dashboard by passing token on the url?

1 Answers1