Deploy and Use Kite: A Lightweight Kubernetes Dashboard

Overview

Kite is a lightweight Kubernetes dashboard with a Chinese user interface, built with a Go backend and a React frontend. It provides real‑time metrics, multi‑cluster management, and enterprise‑grade security features.

Key Features

Cluster status view, log inspection, configuration editing, and command execution.

Real‑time resource metrics.

Support for managing multiple clusters.

JWT‑based authentication and AES encryption for secret data.

Full Chinese language interface.

Installation

1. Helm chart (recommended)

Add the Helm repository and install the chart into the kube-system namespace:

helm repo add kite https://zxh326.github.io/kite
helm repo update
helm install kite kite/kite -n kube-system

For production, provide a custom values.yaml that overrides the default JWT secret and encryption key, for example:

jwtSecret: "your-random-jwt-secret"
encryptionKey: "your-32-byte-encryption-key"

2. Direct YAML manifests

Apply the bundled manifest or fetch it directly from GitHub:

kubectl apply -f deploy/install.yaml
# or
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zxh326/kite/main/deploy/install.yaml

Exposing the Dashboard

The installation creates a Service named kite in the kite-system namespace.

LoadBalancer (cloud environments)

kubectl patch svc kite -n kite-system -p '{"spec": {"type": "LoadBalancer"}}'

Ingress (recommended for production)

Example Ingress resource using the NGINX ingress controller:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: kite
  namespace: kite-system
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  rules:
    - host: kite.example.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: kite
                port:
                  number: 8080

First‑time Access

Open the exposed address in a web browser. The dashboard launches a setup wizard that prompts for the JWT secret and optional encryption key if they were not supplied via values.yaml.

Repository

Source code and releases are available at:

https://github.com/zxh326/kite