How to Deploy Higress 1.1 as a Standalone Cloud‑Native Gateway Without Kubernetes

What is Higress

In traditional virtualized deployments, microservices often use Spring Cloud Gateway as the business gateway and Nginx as the front‑end traffic gateway. In the cloud‑native era dominated by containers and Kubernetes, Ingress becomes the standard gateway, merging traffic and service gateways. Higress, built on Alibaba’s internal next‑generation cloud‑native gateway, integrates traffic scheduling, service governance, and security protection, and deeply integrates Dubbo, Nacos, Sentinel, etc. The latest Higress 1.1 version also supports deployment outside Kubernetes.

Deploy PIG Microservice

PIG is a microservice development platform based on Spring Boot 3.1, Spring Cloud 2022 & Alibaba, and Spring Authorization Server.

1. Deploy microservice application

<code># Get source code

git clone https://gitee.com/log4j/pig.git -b jdk17

git clone https://gitee.com/log4j/pig-ui.git -b jdk17
</code>

Documentation: https://wiki.pig4cloud.com

2. Front‑end adjustments

Comment out the captcha and encryption key switches in the front‑end .env file; they will be optimized in later versions.

Deploy Higress

Deploy Higress in a non‑Kubernetes environment with a single command (compatible with macOS and Linux; Windows requires Cygwin):

<code># nacos points to the pig‑register Nacos service
curl -fsSL https://higress.io/standalone/get-higress.sh | bash -s -- -c nacos://172.16.1.109:8848 --nacos-username=nacos --nacos-password=nacos -p 123456
</code>

After successful startup, the following ports are exposed:

80 – HTTP proxy

443 – HTTPS proxy

15020 – Prometheus metrics

8080 – Higress console (admin/123456)

1. Configure Higress domain

Point the domain name to the machine’s 80/443 ports.

2. Service list

The service list automatically syncs with the services registered in Nacos.

3. Configure route forwarding

Create two new routes in the route management, forwarding requests based on their prefixes to the corresponding microservices.

4. Configure route rewrite rules

Using rewrite policies, /admin/user/info can be rewritten to /user/info, achieving the same effect as Spring Cloud Gateway’s path‑rewrite filter.

<code>/auth/oauth2/token -> /oauth2/token
/admin/user/info  -> /user/info
</code>

Run Tests

Disable the original spring‑cloud‑gateway service (pig‑gateway).

Redirect the front‑end to Higress.

Access the local UI at http://localhost:8888 for testing.

Conclusion

Compared with other gateway competitors such as Kong or APISIX, the Higress + Nacos combination offers a minimal runtime environment while satisfying service registration, configuration management, and microservice governance needs. It is easy to get started and performs excellently.