Exposing the Longhorn UI allows external access to the management console. The choice of Ingress controller (for example, ingress-nginx, Traefik, or HAProxy) affects only how the UI is accessed. It has no impact on the Longhorn backend, storage operations, or data integrity.

Note: As of November 2025, the Kubernetes project has announced the retirement of the ingress-nginx controller. For details, see the official announcement.

Prerequisites for Access and Authentication

These instructions assume that Longhorn is already installed in the cluster.

If you installed Longhorn using the YAML manifest, you must set up an Ingress controller to allow external traffic into the cluster. Authentication is not enabled by default. This applies to both Helm and kubectl installations.

For information on creating an NGINX Ingress controller with basic authentication, see this section. Alternatively, you can use the Gateway API HTTPRoute as a modern approach to exposing the Longhorn UI.

If Longhorn was installed as a Rancher catalog app, Rancher automatically creates an Ingress controller with access control (the rancher-proxy).

Accessing the Longhorn UI

After Longhorn is installed in your Kubernetes cluster, you can access the UI dashboard by following these steps.

1. Retrieve the Longhorn service information:

   kubectl -n longhorn-system get svc
   

   For Longhorn v0.8.0 and later, the output resembles the following. Use the CLUSTER-IP of the longhorn-frontend service to access the UI:

   NAME                TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
   longhorn-backend    ClusterIP   10.20.248.250   <none>        9500/TCP   58m
   longhorn-frontend   ClusterIP   10.20.245.110   <none>        80/TCP     58m
   

   In this example, the UI is accessible at 10.20.245.110.

   Note: Starting with Longhorn v0.8.0, the UI service type changed from LoadBalancer to ClusterIP.

2. Open a browser and navigate to the IP address of the longhorn-frontend service.

   The Longhorn UI appears as follows: