Running Kubernetes on Minikube

This tutorial will focus on using a tool called minikube.

If you haven’t installed them already, go ahead and install VirtualBox 5.2 or higher, install minikube, and install kubectl.

You’ll need kubectl to interact with the cluster once it’s created.

Check virtualization support

To use VM drivers, verify that your system has virtualization support enabled:

$ egrep -q 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo && echo yes || echo no

If the above command outputs “no”:

• If you are running within a VM, your hypervisor does not allow nested virtualization. You will need to use the None (bare-metal) driver
• If you are running on a physical machine, ensure that your BIOS has hardware virtualization enabled

Create a cluster

Once VirtualBox, minikube, and kubectl are installed, create a cluster with minikube:

$ minikube start --driver=virtualbox

This will create a cluster with a single node - perfect for local development.

You should see output similar to the following:

😄  minikube v1.9.0 on Ubuntu 18.04
✨  Using the virtualbox driver based on user configuration
💿  Downloading VM boot image ...
💾  Downloading Kubernetes v1.18.0 preload ...
🔥  Creating virtualbox VM (CPUs=2, Memory=6000MB, Disk=20000MB) ...
🐳  Preparing Kubernetes v1.18.0 on Docker 19.03.8 ...
🌟  Enabling addons: default-storageclass, storage-provisioner
🏄  Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube"

Now we can interact with our cluster! Try that out now:

$ kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes master is running at https://192.168.99.164:8443
KubeDNS is running at https://192.168.99.164:8443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use ‘kubectl cluster-info dump’.