How can I connect to CockroachDB from outside the Kubernetes cluster?
From inside the Kubernetes cluster, you can talk to the database by connecting the cockroachdb-public DNS name. In the docs, that corresponds to the example command:
kubectl run cockroachdb -it --image=cockroachdb/cockroach --rm --restart=Never -- sql --insecure --host=cockroachdb-publicWhile that command is using the CockroachDB image, any Postgres client driver you use should be able to connect to cockroachdb-public when running with the Kubernetes cluster.
Connecting to the database from outside of the Kubernetes cluster will require exposing the cockroachdb-public service. The details will depend somewhat on how your Kubernetes cluster was deployed, so I'd recommend checking out their docs on that:https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/connect-applications-service/#exposing-the-service
And in case you're curious, the reason forwarding port 26257 isn't working for you is because port forwarding from a pod only works if the process in the pod is listening on localhost, but the CockroachDB process in the statefulset configuration is set up to listen on the pod's hostname (as configured via the --host flag).