Setting up Minikube

Learning objectives

You know how to set up Minikube.

Installing Minikube

Minikube allows quickly setting up a local Kubernetes cluster that can be used for development and testing. It is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Start by visiting the Minikube installation page and following the instructions for your operating system.

Note that the installation guidelines are different for each operating system. Running Minikube with WSL2 requires additional steps -- as a starting point, see e.g. https://gist.github.com/wholroyd/748e09ca0b78897750791172b2abb051 and https://github.com/cheslijones/wsl2-minikube).

For example, in Linux, we would use the binary installation method as presented on the page:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 77.3M  100 77.3M    0     0  5040k      0  0:00:15  0:00:15 --:--:-- 5050k
sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube
[sudo] password for user: (your password)

Once done, we can run the minikube version command to check whether the installation was successful. The command outputs the version of the installed Minikube.

minikube version
minikube version: v1.29.0
commit: ddac20b4b34a9c8c857fc602203b6ba2679794d3

The following instructions outline working with Minikube on Linux. If you are using a different operating system, please refer to the Minikube documentation.

Starting and stopping a Minikube cluster

To start a Minikube cluster, we use the minikube start command. The command starts a cluster with the default configuration (note that running the command for the first time can be slow as it downloads required images).

minikube start
😄  minikube v1.29.0 on Ubuntu 22.04
✨  Automatically selected the docker driver. Other choices: ssh, none
📌  Using Docker driver with root privileges
👍  Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
🚜  Pulling base image ...
💾  Downloading Kubernetes v1.26.1 preload ...
    > preloaded-images-k8s-v18-v1...:  397.05 MiB / 397.05 MiB  100.00% 2.49 Mi
    > gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase...:  407.19 MiB / 407.19 MiB  100.00% 2.56 Mi
🔥  Creating docker container (CPUs=2, Memory=7800MB) ...
🐳  Preparing Kubernetes v1.26.1 on Docker 20.10.23 ...
    ▪ Generating certificates and keys ...
    ▪ Booting up control plane ...
    ▪ Configuring RBAC rules ...
🔗  Configuring bridge CNI (Container Networking Interface) ...
    ▪ Using image gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner:v5
🔎  Verifying Kubernetes components...
🌟  Enabled addons: storage-provisioner, default-storageclass
💡  kubectl not found. If you need it, try: 'minikube kubectl -- get pods -A'
🏄  Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default

To stop the cluster, we run the minikube stop command. The command stops the cluster, but does not delete it.

minikube stop
✋  Stopping node "minikube"  ...
🛑  Powering off "minikube" via SSH ...
🛑  1 node stopped.

Installing kubectl

In the above output, when starting Minikube, we saw the message kubectl not found -- kubectl is a command-line tool for interacting with the Kubernetes cluster. To install kubectl, follow the kubectl related installation instructions on the Kubernetes Install Tools documentation.

You can skip this step if you wish and use kubectl through Minikube. The command minikube kubectl -- <command> would run kubectl, giving it <command> as the command. For example minikube kubectl -- get nodes would list nodes in the Minikube cluster.

In the subsequent examples, we assume that you have installed kubectl, have created an alias for kubectl (as outlined in Minikube documentation), or are using minikube kubectl.

Starting Minikube again

Now, when kubectl is installed, we can start minikube again. This time, when running the command minikube start, the output is as follows.

minikube start
😄  minikube v1.29.0 on Ubuntu 22.04
✨  Using the docker driver based on existing profile
👍  Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
🚜  Pulling base image ...
🔄  Restarting existing docker container for "minikube" ...
🐳  Preparing Kubernetes v1.26.1 on Docker 20.10.23 ...
🔗  Configuring bridge CNI (Container Networking Interface) ...
🔎  Verifying Kubernetes components...
    ▪ Using image gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner:v5
🌟  Enabled addons: storage-provisioner, default-storageclass
🏄  Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default

As we notice, the output also states that kubectl is now configured to use the cluster. Now, when we run the command kubectl get pods -- asking for the pods in the current namespace -- we see that no pods have been deployed.

kubectl get pods
No resources found in default namespace.

The default namespace is the namespace that is used when we do not explicitly specify a namespace. We'll continue using the default namespace for now.