IBKR-PTL

Interactive Brokers Gateway with PTL Trader + VNC

Deploying to a Kubernetes cluster

Prerequisites

• This repository is generally for Google Cloud Platform but can be adapted to other infrastructure
• You need a working Kubernetes cluster (outside the scope of this repo). I am using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) but you can use your own cluster on Google Compute Engine (GCE) or any other cloud provider with only slight adaptation i.e. disk creation
  • You can start here if you are a beginner - official Kubernetes guide
• You need the Google Cloud SDK for this example - installing Google Cloud SDK

Create a disk and a volume in GCE

gcloud compute disks create --size=5GB --zone=[your-gce-zone] ibkr-ptl
kubectl apply -f gce-volume.yaml

Create the namespace, password to login to VNC with, and the deployment

kubectl apply -f 00-namespace.yaml
kubectl create secret generic vnc-pw --from-literal=password=[your-password] --namespace=ibkr-ptl
kubectl apply -f ibkr-ptl-Deployment.yaml

Starting a VNC session

This deployment is based on the Docker image from ConSol/docker-headless-vnc-container so you have the option of starting a traditional VNC session and connecting to it with any VNC client (RealVNC for example) or you can use noVNC and login through your browser.

All connections are done to localhost and are completely encrypted and secured by the built-in Kubernetes kubectl port-forward command. In other words, you are opening an encrypted connection to you cluster, and forwarding ports from your cluster to your localhost where you can safely connect to VNC. Additionally, we create a password for the VNC server itself.

To use traditional VNC:

kubectl port-forward --namespace=ibkr-ptl ibkr-ptl-[podnumber] 5901:5901

And connect to localhost:5901 from your preferred VNC client.

To use noVNC HTML5 client with your browser:

kubectl port-forward --namespace=ibkr-ptl ibkr-ptl-[podnumber] 6901:6901

And open a browser and enter the address http://localhost:6901/vnc.html

Using either option you should be prompted to enter the VNC password you set in the kubectl create secret step before.