garage-webui accessing garagehq in k8s
I’ve set up the GarageHQ instead of the MinIO that recently went south with the licencing, but it took me a while to set up a garage-webui, a Web-GUI for GarageHQ.
It seems to be primarily described as a tool to be used in docker-composer, so when it came to making it play nicely with GarageHQ in k8s with Istio on top, several problems occurred. To enforce it within k8s, you need to reach GarageHQ’s admin port, but the service exposes only s3-api (3900) and s3-web (3902) ports by default. Fortunately, the logs of a running GarageHQ pod disclose that the admin port is exposed automatically in the very pod:2026-02-24T23:29:45.811741Z INFO garage_model::garage: Initialize K2V RPC handler…
2026-02-24T23:29:45.811779Z INFO garage::server: Initializing background runner…
2026-02-24T23:29:45.811880Z INFO garage::server: Spawning Garage workers…
2026-02-24T23:29:45.811962Z INFO garage::server: Initialize Admin API server and metrics collector…
2026-02-24T23:29:45.811974Z INFO garage::server: Launching internal Garage cluster communications…
2026-02-24T23:29:45.811994Z INFO garage::server: Initializing S3 API server…
2026-02-24T23:29:45.812003Z INFO garage::server: Initializing web server…
2026-02-24T23:29:45.812018Z INFO garage::server: Launching Admin API server…
2026-02-24T23:29:45.812070Z INFO garage_net::netapp: Listening on [::]:3901
2026-02-24T23:29:45.812107Z INFO garage_api_common::generic_server: S3 API server listening on http://[::]:3900
2026-02-24T23:29:45.812155Z INFO garage_web::web_server: Web server listening on http://[::]:3902
2026-02-24T23:29:45.812185Z INFO garage_api_common::generic_server: Admin API server listening on http://[::]:3903
so it was enough to add the service in the service template and prepare the values for it in the values-file:
to have the garage and the webui start playing nicely together:
The Web-GUI then starts working properly, because now it can reach the GarageHQ via the newly exposed service, that was not there by default:
Happy hacking!