Headlamp: An Extensible Kubernetes Web UI
Shriira Press
A friendly, extensible web UI for Kubernetes — see your clusters clearly, respect every user's RBAC, and extend the interface with plugins, in the browser or on the desktop.
Welcome to Headlamp: An Extensible Kubernetes Web UI.
Headlamp is a Kubernetes web interface, now an official Kubernetes sub-project under SIG UI, built around two ideas that most dashboards treat as afterthoughts: that the UI should respect each user's real permissions, and that it should be extensible enough to become whatever a team needs. It runs the same React frontend whether you install it as a desktop app reading your local kubeconfig or deploy it in-cluster behind your identity provider, and a small Go backend proxies every request to the Kubernetes API so the cluster's own RBAC decides what each person can see. This free book teaches it from the ground up: what Headlamp is and the problem it solves, the backend-and-frontend architecture, the two deployment modes (desktop and in-cluster), how authentication and RBAC shape every view, navigating clusters and resources, the plugin system that makes Headlamp extensible, and using it well in practice. Seven focused chapters with clear diagrams that make a modern Kubernetes UI concrete — see your clusters, trust the permissions, and build the interface your team actually wants.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press