Traefik dashboard/web UI 404 when installed via helm on Digitalocean single node cluster - kubernetes

Question

I am trying to set Traefik as my ingress controller and load balancer on a single node cluster(Digital Ocean). Following the official Traefik setup guide I installed Traefik using helm:
helm install --values values.yaml stable/traefik
# values.yaml
dashboard:
enabled: true
domain: traefik-ui.minikube
kubernetes:
namespaces:
- default
- kube-system
#output
RESOURCES:
==> v1/Pod(related)
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
operatic-emu-traefik-f5dbf4b8f-z9bzp 0/1 ContainerCreating 0 1s
==> v1/ConfigMap
NAME AGE
operatic-emu-traefik 1s
==> v1/Service
operatic-emu-traefik-dashboard 1s
operatic-emu-traefik 1s
==> v1/Deployment
operatic-emu-traefik 1s
==> v1beta1/Ingress
operatic-emu-traefik-dashboard 1s
Then I created the service exposing the Web UI
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containous/traefik/master/examples/k8s/ui.yaml
Then I can clearly see my traefik pod running and an external-ip being assigned:
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
service/dashboard ClusterIP 10.245.156.214 <none> 443/TCP 11d
service/kubernetes ClusterIP 10.245.0.1 <none> 443/TCP 14d
service/operatic-emu-traefik LoadBalancer 10.245.137.41 <external-ip> 80:31190/TCP,443:30207/TCP 5m7s
service/operatic-emu-traefik-dashboard ClusterIP 10.245.8.156 <none> 80/TCP 5m7s
Then opening http://external-ip/dashboard/ leads to 404 page not found
I read a ton of answers and tutorials but keep missing something. Any help is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

I am writing this post as the information is a bit much to fit in a comment. After spending enough time on understanding how k8s and helm charts work, this is how I solved it:
Firstly, I missed the RBAC part, I did not create ClusterRole and ClusterRoleBinding in order to authorise Traefik to use K8S API (as I am using 1.12 version). Hence, either I should have deployed ClusterRole and ClusterRoleBinding manually or added the following in my values.yaml
rbac:
enabled: true
Secondly, I tried to access dashboard ui from ip directly without realising Traefik uses hostname to direct to its dashboard as #Rico mentioned above (I am voting you up as you did provide helpful info but I did not manage to connect all pieces of the puzzle at that time). So, either edit your /etc/hosts file linking your hostname to the external-ip and then access the dashboard via browser or test that it is working with curl:
curl http://external-ip/dashboard/ -H 'Host: traefik-ui.minikube'
To sum up, you should be able to install Traefik and access its dashboard ui by installing:
helm install --values values.yaml stable/traefik
# values.yaml
dashboard:
enabled: true
domain: traefik-ui.minikube
rbac:
enabled: true
kubernetes:
namespaces:
- default
- kube-system
and then editing your hosts file and opening the hostname you chose.
Now the confusing part from the official traefik setup guide is the section named Submitting an Ingress to the Cluster just below the Deploy Traefik using Helm Chart that instructs to install a service and an ingress object in order to be able to access the dashboard. This is unneeded as the official stable/traefik helm chart provides both of them. You would need that if you want to install traefik by deploying all needed objects manually. However for a person just starting out with k8s and helm, it looks like that section needs to be completed after installing helm via the official stable/traefik chart.

Answer 2

I believe this is the same issue as this.
You either have to connect with the traefik-ui.minikube hostname or add a host entry on your Ingress definition like this:
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
namespace: kube-system
name: traefik-ingress
annotations:
kubernetes.io/ingress.class: traefik
spec:
rules:
- host: yourown.hostname.com
http:
paths:
- path: /dashboard
backend:
serviceName: traefik-web-ui
servicePort: web
You can check with:
$ kubectl -n kube-system get ingress