How to: Connect to Your Kubeflow Cluster
After installation, it will take some time for all Pods to become ready. Ensure all Pods are ready before trying to connect; otherwise, you might encounter unexpected errors. To check that all Kubeflow-related Pods are ready, use the following commands:

```sh
kubectl get pods -n cert-manager
kubectl get pods -n istio-system
kubectl get pods -n auth
kubectl get pods -n oauth2-proxy
kubectl get pods -n knative-serving
kubectl get pods -n kubeflow
kubectl get pods -n kubeflow-user-example-com
```

#### Port-Forward

The default way of accessing Kubeflow is via port-forwarding. This enables you to get started quickly without imposing any requirements on your environment. Run the following to port-forward Istio's Ingress-Gateway to local port `8080`:

```sh
kubectl port-forward svc/istio-ingressgateway -n istio-system 8080:80
```

After running the command, you can access the Kubeflow Central Dashboard by doing the following:

1. Open your browser and visit `http://localhost:8080`. You should see the Dex login screen.
2. Log in with the default user's credentials. The default email address is `user@example.com`, and the default password is `12341234`.

#### NodePort / LoadBalancer / Ingress

To connect to Kubeflow using NodePort / LoadBalancer / Ingress, you need to set up HTTPS. The reason is that many of our web applications (e.g., Tensorboard Web Application, Jupyter Web Application, Katib UI) use [Secure Cookies](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Cookies#restrict_access_to_cookies), so accessing Kubeflow with HTTP over a non-localhost domain does not work.

Exposing your Kubeflow cluster with proper HTTPS is a straightforward process but depends on your environment. You can expose the `istio-ingressgateway` service in the `istio-system` namespace via nginx-ingress or any other ingress provider. For security reasons, only use `ClusterIP` on the service, not NodePort or something similarly dangerous. There is third-party [commercial support](https://www.kubeflow.org/docs/started/support/) available.

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**NOTE**

If you absolutely need to expose Kubeflow over HTTP, you can disable the `Secure Cookies` feature by setting the `APP_SECURE_COOKIES` environment variable to `false` in every relevant web app. This is not recommended, as it poses security risks.

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