How to fix error 413: Request Entity Too Large in Kubernetes and Helm

How to fix error 413: Request Entity Too Large in Kubernetes and Helm

Jessica Deen
Jessica Deen
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I have been using the nginx-ingress helm chart in my clusters for quite some time now. I like having only one load balancer to handle any of the apps running on my cluster. This way I can route traffic through my nginx proxy and link it over the stable/cert-mgr helm chart to auto configure SSL Let’s Encrypt certs for my deployments.

However, when going down the rabbit hole to migrate my website from WordPress to Ghost, I went to upload/import the exported json file as part of the migration process and I was given the following error:

413: Request Entity Too Large

Turns out the error was due to my default configuration of nginx. I knew the solution if I had nginx running on a VM (I just modify the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and restart the service), but I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it from a helm chart, especially since I want the change to persist in the event of a pod/deployment failure or re-deployment.

I went to the chart docs and still couldn’t find the obvious answer, but I did find customized configmap.yaml files with hints of the answer.

TL;DR: There are a few solutions.

  1. I make my own values.yaml file so I can override the defaults for the nginx helm chart. I need to add in proxy-body-size: 256m under config: my chart adds an annotation to my deployed configmap, which would then set the client-max-body limit to whatever I specified. By default it is 1m and in my example I’m going to increase it to 256m.

You can see the full default values file here, but the beginning of my customize values override.yaml is below:

## nginx configuration
## Ref: https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress/blob/master/controllers/nginx/configuration.md
##
controller:
  name: controller
  image:
    repository: quay.io/kubernetes-ingress-controller/nginx-ingress-controller
    tag: "0.22.0"
    pullPolicy: IfNotPresent

  config:
    proxy-body-size: 256m
  # Will add custom header to Nginx https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/tree/master/docs/examples/customization/custom-headers
  headers: {}

  # Required for use with CNI based kubernetes installations (such as ones set up by kubeadm),
  # since CNI and hostport don't mix yet. Can be deprecated once https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/23920
  # is merged
  hostNetwork: false

Note, I left all other settings the same so, in theory, I could use the -f flag in my pipeline when I setup nginx-ingress via the stable helm chart and use my custom values.yaml, but there are other options.

  1. Since proxy-body-size is the only change I’m making, I could also use --set with controller.config.proxy-body-size=256m, which would work just the same. Now, I may keep a values file in my dotcom/iac repo folder just in case I want to make future config updates in which --set doesn’t make sense.
  2. The 3rd options is to apply this setting to specific Ingress objects by applying the following annotation: nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: 256m

The answer may be different depending on your needs and your use of the nginx ingress helm chart, but at the very least, I hope this helps someone with a more obvious answer than my 30+ open tabs suggested.

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