In this guide, we will find out how to create a new user using the Service Account mechanism of Kubernetes, grant this user admin permissions and login to Dashboard using a bearer token tied to this user.
IMPORTANT: Make sure that you know what you are doing before proceeding. Granting admin privileges to Dashboard's Service Account might be a security risk.
For each of the following snippets for ServiceAccount
and ClusterRoleBinding
, you should copy them to new manifest files like dashboard-adminuser.yaml
and use kubectl apply -f dashboard-adminuser.yaml
to create them.
We are creating Service Account with the name admin-user
in namespace kubernetes-dashboard
first.
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
name: admin-user
namespace: kubernetes-dashboard
In most cases after provisioning the cluster using kops
, kubeadm
or any other popular tool, the ClusterRole
cluster-admin
already exists in the cluster. We can use it and create only a ClusterRoleBinding
for our ServiceAccount
.
If it does not exist then you need to create this role first and grant required privileges manually.
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
name: admin-user
roleRef:
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
kind: ClusterRole
name: cluster-admin
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
name: admin-user
namespace: kubernetes-dashboard
Now we need to find the token we can use to log in. Execute the following command:
kubectl -n kubernetes-dashboard create token admin-user
It should print something like:
eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsImtpZCI6IiJ9.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.Z2JrQlitASVwWbc-s6deLRFVk5DWD3P_vjUFXsqVSY10pbjFLG4njoZwh8p3tLxnX_VBsr7_6bwxhWSYChp9hwxznemD5x5HLtjb16kI9Z7yFWLtohzkTwuFbqmQaMoget_nYcQBUC5fDmBHRfFvNKePh_vSSb2h_aYXa8GV5AcfPQpY7r461itme1EXHQJqv-SN-zUnguDguCTjD80pFZ_CmnSE1z9QdMHPB8hoB4V68gtswR1VLa6mSYdgPwCHauuOobojALSaMc3RH7MmFUumAgguhqAkX3Omqd3rJbYOMRuMjhANqd08piDC3aIabINX6gP5-Tuuw2svnV6NYQ
Now copy the token and paste it into the Enter token
field on the login screen.
Click the Sign in
button and that's it. You are now logged in as an admin.
Remove the admin ServiceAccount
and ClusterRoleBinding
.
kubectl -n kubernetes-dashboard delete serviceaccount admin-user
kubectl -n kubernetes-dashboard delete clusterrolebinding admin-user
In order to find out more about how to grant/deny permissions in Kubernetes read the official authentication & authorization documentation.
Copyright 2020 The Kubernetes Dashboard Authors