The kubernetes/ingress-nginx repository is an Ingress controller for Kubernetes that uses NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer. Written in Go, it enables traffic routing and service exposure within Kubernetes clusters by implementing the Ingress API specification. The project is classified across multiple networking domains including ingress control, load balancing, reverse proxy functionality, traffic routing, API gateway capabilities, and edge proxy operations.
The repository is currently in a retirement phase as of November 2025. According to the README, best-effort maintenance will continue until March 2026, after which there will be no further releases, bugfixes, or security vulnerability updates. The project explicitly warns that new deployments should not use ingress-nginx and should instead adopt Gateway API implementations. Additionally, the documentation cautions against using the controller in multi-tenant Kubernetes production installations, as it assumes users with Ingress object creation capabilities are cluster administrators.
The project maintains extensive version compatibility documentation, with supported versions ranging from v1.15.1 down through v1.3.1. Current actively maintained versions include v1.15.1, v1.15.0, v1.14.x series, and v1.13.x series, each tested against specific Kubernetes versions from 1.35 down to 1.20. The controller bundles NGINX 1.27.1 in recent versions and uses Alpine Linux 3.23.3 as the base image. Helm chart versions are maintained in parallel with controller releases, with the latest being 4.15.1.
Community engagement shows significant activity levels tracked across 1295 issues and pull requests. The median response latency for issues and PRs is 863.3 hours, though the mean extends to 10329.8 hours, indicating variable response times across the backlog. The most frequently applied issue labels are needs-priority with 1070 occurrences, needs-triage with 1063 occurrences, and needs-kind with 337 occurrences, reflecting ongoing triage demands. Primary contributors include longwuyuan with 1435 tracked events, Gacko with 686 events, and strongjz with 258 events. The repository shares overlapping contributors with major projects including microsoft/vscode, rust-lang/rust, and microsoft/typescript.
The project provides comprehensive documentation including troubleshooting guides, detailed changelogs for each release version, and separate changelog tracking for Helm chart updates. Users encountering issues are directed to review troubleshooting documentation, search existing issues, or engage with the community through the #ingress-nginx-users channel on the Kubernetes Slack server. The repository is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and adheres to the Kubernetes Community Code of Conduct.
