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Webrecorder Browserkube

This repository contains an experimental, Kubernetes-native Webrecorder remote browser orchestration system.

The system supports several use cases:

  • Running browsers as demanded by the user, with VNC, shutting down after fixed amount of time or when user closes connection.
  • Running browsers controlled by a driver container, which shuts down the browser when done.
  • Headless browser or 'headful', with or without VNC.
  • Running browsers with custom, pre-prepared browser profiles to supply cookies, site-specific preferences or other config; specify a default profile to use for all URLs or provide a list of URL-specific profiles.

This repository provides an extensible set of containers and a Helm chart installable from https://webrecorder.github.io/browserkube/charts.

Requirements:

  • A Kubernetes cluster
  • A local copy of kubectl, configured to run commands against the cluster
  • A local copy of Helm 3

Optional:

Browserkube ships with a minimally-configured deployment of Minio for storage.

You may prefer to use an external S3-compatible storage service like Amazon Simple Storage Service or Digital Oceans Spaces Object Storage.

Setup

The system uses Helm to deploy to a Kubernetes cluster.

  1. Add the Browserkube chart repository to Helm: helm repo add browserkube https://webrecorder.github.io/browserkube/charts

  2. Configure the chart:

    1. touch config.yaml.
    2. As desired, override any of the default config in helm show values browserkube/browserkube (see chart/values.yaml) by adding keys to config.yaml. (For example, to use custom storage, set enable_minio: False and copy over the complete "storage" mapping, swapping in your credentials and details in place of the default minio config values.)

  3. Run helm install bk browserkube/browserkube -f ./config.yaml to install a release (here, arbitrarily named "bk") of the chart on the currently configured Kubernetes cluster. If successful, helm list will list the bk release, and kubectl get services will list the browserkube service, and you should be able to see the service and its pods in the Kubernetes dashboard. kubectl get namespaces should list the (newly-created) namespace specified by the browser_namespace config value.

  4. To uninstall the release, run helm uninstall bk.

Ingress Option / Exposing the Service

If the ingress.host and ingress.cert_email are set, the Helm chart will configure an Ingress controller on the specified host and attempt to obtain an SSL cert via Letsencrypt. This is the recommended approach for basic cloud installations.

If the host is omitted, no ingress is created, and you will need to expose the service using other strategies. This may be useful if you wish to deploy the service to an internal network, or when using an external load balancer. It is presently the only option locally.

For example, if developing locally using minikube, minikube service --url browserkube will expose the browserkube service to your localhost on a random port; minikube service --url minio will do the same with minio.

Or, you can arrange for port-forwarding using kubectl: kubectl port-forward service/browserkube 8080:80 will map localhost:8080 to a single browserkube pod (all traffic will be directed to one pod, selected when the command is run, even if multiple pods are running on the cluster) and kubectl port-forward service/minio 9000 will expose minio on port 9000. However, as of 12/8/20, this strategy is known to be relatively flaky.