Feature Request: kubectl port-forward equivalent

[MikeAndrews90]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
An equivalent to kubectl port-forward. Our VNet is completely private, and nothing be accessed externally, and we don't add external ingress via app gateway or front door. Having a port-forward would greatly aid in debugging locally when requiring dependent services deployed in container apps.

Describe the solution you'd like.
If the az cli could have some kind of az containerapp port-forward -n myapp -g my-resource-group 80 7001 style command, so I can hit a service on localhost.

Describe alternatives you've considered.
Ngrok, or something similar.

[simonjj]

@MikeAndrews90, thanks for reaching out and letting us know about your use case. I had a couple of questions for you:

• Where you able to use ngrok or ssh as a workaround to make this work?
• Considering that your organization has decided to make their VNet completely private how would this feature be received by the team responsible for security/networking? I've done some similar things in the past but usually in a non-critical environment so I am curious on what the "official" position would be.

[MikeAndrews90]

Hi @simonjj thanks for replying. I didn't actually try ngrok in the end (licensing considerations and installation into the container etc). My intention was to do this on our development environment, I'd have to check with the team whether they'd be happy for something ngrok to be used in production, but as we don't have licenses anyway it'd probably be a no go.

I think ssh would be a better alternative though, I've seen some guides on using it for app services etc with a VM, do you think the setup would be similar for container app, any advice or guidance there you might have?

[rhuanbarreto]

You could run a Tailscale container as a VPN gateway so you could access it from a tunnel. With a completely isolated vNET is actually hard to setup such things without a VPN gateway.