"SSC API key is required" on Sitecore K8s

“SSC API key is required” on Sitecore K8s

June 15, 2022

When trying to connect to Sitecore (hosted in AKS) from my Next.JS head (hosted externally), I got following error:

SSC API key is required. Pass with 'sc_apikey' query string or HTTP header.

The code that caused the issue was a textbook GraphQL request:

const graphQLClient = new GraphQLRequestClient(config.graphQLEndpoint, {
    apiKey: config.sitecoreApiKey,
});

Turns out nginx (that connects incoming AKS traffic to the actual Sitecore containers) does not allow underscores in header keys by default:

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#underscores_in_headers

This case (different use case though) is documented in SitecoreXP1020ProductionDeploymentWithKubernetes-en.pdf, see

4.6.3. When I request SSC, problems occur if there are underscores in header names

but since that document is not indexed by Google, finding it was not that easy.

Luckily somebody had a similar issue when running Sitecore on Amazon: https://github.com/Sitecore/jss/issues/1060.

The solution for k8s is straightforward. Simply add

enable-underscores-in-headers: "true"

to ingress-nginx\configuration.yaml (the configmap used by nginx).

Note that if you install this with kubectl -k ingress-nginx this requires nginx and Sitecore to run in the same namespace. If not, the config map is created in the Sitecore namespace, but won’t be picked up by nginx.