In this blog post, we will show you how to use port forwarding on a single node Kubernetes cluster and forward traffic to a pod.
Using port forwarding rather than creating service is probably a more straightforward and clean method for quick testing of applications.
Let’s get started with deploying a pod and using port-forwarding to access it using a browser. In this demo, I will be using the nginx official image to deploy a pod.
Deploy a Pod
Let’s go ahead and deploy a pod using the command below.
kubectl run nginx --image=nginx
Please wait a few seconds for the pod to come up, and now let’s port-forward traffic to the pod. In my case, I will open port 8080 from the cluster.
kubectl port-forward pod/nginx 8080:80
If I open a web browser and browse to HTTP://localhost:8080 (I’m using Docker Desktop with Kubernetes). If your Kubernetes host is not running on localhost, use the host’s IP address with port number 8080.
![](https://ntweekly-3e2e1f4957bdf35452c0-endpoint.azureedge.net/blobntweekly18036ad1fb/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/image-1-1024x296.png)
Once you close the connection from the console the port forwarding rule will be removed so there is nothing to delete after.