Can not access ingress service from within cluster - kubernetes

Question

I am new to kubernetes and I have minikube setup on my linux mint 20.
I am trying to implement server side rendering with nextjs, I have installed ingress-nginx using helm.
ingess-service.yaml :
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: ingress-service
annotations:
kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex: "true"
spec:
rules:
- host: example.dev
http:
paths:
- backend:
serviceName: users-srv
servicePort: 4000
path: /api/users/?(.*)
- backend:
serviceName: ui-srv
servicePort: 3000
path: /?(.*)
in next js app ui I want to access ingress controller in order to make api calls from server side. I tried:
axios.get('http://ingress-nginx-controller-admission/api/users/currentuser')
axios.get('http://ingress-nginx-controller/api/users/currentuser')
axios.get('http://ingress-service/api/users/currentuser')
but nothing is working.
kubctl get services:
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
ingress-nginx-controller LoadBalancer 10.107.45.123 172.42.42.100 80:31205/TCP,443:32568/TCP 80m
ingress-nginx-controller-admission ClusterIP 10.111.229.112 <none> 443/TCP 80m
kubernetes ClusterIP 10.96.0.1 <none> 443/TCP 6d1h
ui-srv ClusterIP 10.99.20.51 <none> 3000/TCP 89s
users-mongo-srv ClusterIP 10.103.187.200 <none> 27017/TCP 89s
users-srv ClusterIP 10.99.15.244 <none> 4000/TCP 89s
can anyone help me out ?
Thanks in advance...

Answer 1

The ingress is designed to handle external traffic to the cluster and as such, it is expecting the request to arrive at the domain you specified (aka example.dev)
To access your APIs from inside a Pod, you should most definitely use directly the services that are served by the Ingress, such as users-srv or ui-srv.
If you really want to contact the ingress instead of the Service, you could try a couple things:
Make so that example.dev points to the LoadBalancer IP address, for example adding it to /etc/hosts of the cluster's nodes should work 8or even internally in the Pod). But take into consideration that this means accessing the services by a long route when you could just access them with the service name.
Remove the host parameter from your rules, meaning the services should be served generally at the IP address of the nginx-controller, this should make using ingress-nginx-controller work as expected. This is not supported by all Ingress Controllers but it could work.