Ingress Nginx goes EOL in March 2026

[pearj]

Ingress Nginx is going EOL in March 2026. What are Ping's plans to respond to this?

[pearj]

@lee-baines thoughts?

[lee-baines]

Hi @pearj. Thanks for highlighting this. I was unaware of Ingress Nginx going EOL. I've created a story to switch out the current Ingress Nginx to an alternative. It will be available in our next maintenance release, hopefully by the end of the year

[pearj]

Thanks @lee-baines, would it likely stay with the Ingress API? Or would you switch to the Kubernetes Gateway API instead? Or as well as?

[lee-baines]

We will stay on the Ingress API for now. The most important consideration for us is to maintain consistency and stability within forgeops. But I will create a spike for the Gateway API to see whether it is something we could offer as an additional option within Helm in the future.

[pearj]

Hi @lee-baines have you picked the Ingress Nginx replacement? It would be good to know asap so we can begin our own preparation.

Would the spike for the Gateway API complete before before Ingress Nginx goes EOL? Or is it more of a future thing that will be looked into separately that won't be offered as an alternative to the Ingress API as part of this EOL?

At present we're leaning towards haproxy simply because it's already on the Forgeops supported list.

[lee-baines]

Hi @pearj. We're looking at https://github.com/nginx/kubernetes-ingress which seems the obvious replacement. We have used this previously so unless there any major issues, this will probably be what we replace ingress-nginx with.

Gateway API is purely a future thing. From a vanilla forgeops, we try to keep everything agnostic and simple so we try not to add too much support for additional 3rd party tooling unless there is a big ask for it across multiple customers and it benefits the default deployment.

HA Proxy is an option. You can select it via the forgeops tool

[pearj]

Thanks @lee-baines, that’s helpful.

[pearj]

@lee-baines I just came across an Ingress Nginx fork by a company called EmeritOSS who apparently keep certain important abandoned OSS projects alive:

• https://www.zdnet.com/article/chainguard-emeritoss-support-for-abandoned-open-source-programs/
• https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/keeping-ingress-nginx-alive
• So long, and thanks for all the fish kubernetes/ingress-nginx#14178 (comment) - the original comment how I found it

Does Ping have an opinion on any safe forks of Ingress Nginx?

[lee-baines]

Hi @pearj. These forks maybe ok if users are happy to use that version themselves. We try to stick with official products where possible. Sometimes its not always possible when you really need a 3rd party feature such as secret generation. But there are genuine alternatives out there. We used nginx-ingress years ago so it makes sense for us to go in that direction again

[peet-j]

Hi @lee-baines Is there an update or timeline on this?
Many thanks

[lee-baines]

Hi @peet-j, we are currently working on the F5 Nginx Ingress implementation. There are some challenges with migrating some of the annotations but we are working through it. We are planning a ForgeOps release this week so we hope that it can be included in that release. If not, we'll follow up with a maintenance release immediately after. So it's top priority. Keep a watch on the releases in ForgeOps.

[lee-baines]

Hi @pearj @peet-j
We are replacing ingress Nginx with Traefik ingress controller. This is a straight swap out with the same setup as nginx but the Traefik controller has extra features such as Gateway API support if a customer wants to use that.

We plan on releasing a new ForgeOps 2026.1.0 later this week/early next week which will have the updated docs, prereqs and ingress class.

For customers who to try this out right away, I've attached a workaround script so you can start experimenting

traefik.sh

[pearj]

Thanks @lee-baines, just confirming that HAProxy will still remain a supported option? Or will it just be Traefik?