Running Kubernetes - Minikube

Minikube is the original “run Kubernetes on your desktop without screwing everything up” tool. Minikube runs Kubernetes in a VM on your machine for users looking to just test Kubernetes out, or Develop against it.

We recommend using KIND (Kubernetes IN Docker), however if you can’t run Docker on your local machine minikube is the next best option.

macOS

Install kubectl

Obviously you’ll need kubectl installed to interact with Kubernetes. You can find instructions for macOS here

Install a Hypervisor

Ensure you have one of HyperKit, VirtualBox, or VMWare Fusion installed.

Install minikube

The easiest way to install Minikube on macOS is using Homebrew:

brew cask install minikube

Note: You can also yolo that install curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-darwin-amd64 \ && chmod +x minikube

Linux

First of all you want to ensure that Virtualization is supported on your machine, it probably is, but its nice to be sure. Run the following command, as long as the output is not 0 you should be good to go:

egrep 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l

Install kubectl

Obviously you’ll need kubectl installed to interact with Kubernetes. You can find instructions for Linux here

Install a Hypervisor

You probably have either VirtualBox or KVM installed.

Note: minikube also supports installing with Docker by using the --vm-driver=none flag, but if you’re going to do that, you should just use KIND.

Install minikube

Install the latest version of minikube from its GitHub releases page. You’ll find .deb and .rpm packages as well as a raw .tgz file for each version.

Note: alternatively you can just yolo that install with curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64 \ && chmod +x minikube

Windows

Install kubectl

Obviously you’ll need kubectl installed to interact with Kubernetes. You can find instructions for Windows here

Install a Hypervisor

You probably have either VirtualBox or Hyper-V installed.

Note: minikube also supports installing with Docker by using the --vm-driver=none flag, but if you’re going to do that, you should just use KIND.

Install minikube

Download the minikube Windows Installer and run it.

Run minikube

Running minikube is the same across the various operating systems once installed.

Start minikube:

$ minikube start
Starting local Kubernetes cluster...
Running pre-create checks...
Creating machine...
Starting local Kubernetes cluster...

Note: if minikube errors with machine does not exist it means you’ve probably run it before. Run minikube delete to cleanup and try again.

Ensure its running by checking its version:

$ kubectl version
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"14", GitVersion:"v1.14.0", GitCommit:"641856db18352033a0d96dbc99153fa3b27298e5", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2019-03-25T15:53:57Z", GoVersion:"go1.12.1", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}
Server Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"13", GitVersion:"v1.13.5", GitCommit:"2166946f41b36dea2c4626f90a77706f426cdea2", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2019-03-25T15:19:22Z", GoVersion:"go1.11.5", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}

Next follow the tutorial to get a running workload on minikube.