Minikube is a single-node Kubernetes cluster that can be installed on macOS, Linux and Windows.
It lets you to try out Kubernetes locally on your personal computer or use it for daily development work.
In this note i will show how to install Minikube & Kubectl on Ubuntu (with VirtualBox) and deploy a first “Hello Minikube” application on a local Kubernetes cluster.
Install Minikube on Ubuntu
Requirements: Minikube requires at least 2 CPUs, 2GB of free memory, 20GB of free disk space, internet connection and container or virtual machine manager (driver), such as: Docker, Hyperkit, Hyper-V, KVM, Parallels, Podman, VirtualBox, or VMWare.
Install Minikube
To install Minikube on Unubtu you just need to download and copy the binary to /usr/local/bin/ with the appropriate permissions:
$ curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64 $ sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube $ minikube version
Install VirtualBox
If you haven’t yet installed any of supported drivers, i suggest to install VirtualBox (5.2 or higher) to deploy Minikube on Ubuntu as a VM:
$ sudo apt install virtualbox virtualbox-ext-pack
Install Kubectl
To deploy and manage a local Minikube cluster it is also required to install kubectl – the official command-line tool for Kubernetes:
$ curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl" $ sudo install kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl $ kubectl version --client -o json
Start Minikube
Cool Tip: Start a Minikube with more memory and CPUs! Read more →
Start a Minikube cluster:
$ minikube start
Get the cluster status:
$ minikube status
Display settings:
$ kubectl config view
List Kubernetes Nodes:
$ kubectl get nodes
Minikube comes with a dashboard add-on that provides a way to manage a Kubernetes cluster through the user interface.
To enable and access the Kubernetes dashboard, run:
$ minikube dashboard
To get the URL of the dashboard:
$ minikube dashboard --url
Hello Minikube – First App Deployment
Once you have a running local Kubernetes cluster, you can deploy a containerized applications on top of it, i.e. create a Deployment:
$ kubectl create deployment hello-minikube --image=gcr.io/google_containers/echoserver:1.4
hello-minikube and starts in it a container from the image gcr.io/google_containers/echoserver:1.4.
To make the hello-minikube container accessible from outside the Kubernetes virtual network, you have to expose the Pod, i.e. create a Service:
$ kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=LoadBalancer --port=8080
Deployment vs Service: A Deployment in Kubernetes is responsible for keeping Pods running. A Service in Kubernetes is responsible for enabling network access to Pods.
To access the hello-minikube application, run:
$ minikube service hello-minikube
List Kubernetes Pods:
$ kubectl get pods
List Kubernetes Deployments and Services:
$ kubectl get deployments $ kubectl get services
Show events:
$ kubectl get events
Clean up
Cool Tip: Login to a Pod using kubectl command! Read more →
To clean up the resources created in the cluster, run:
$ kubectl delete service hello-minikube $ kubectl delete deployment hello-minikube
Stop the Minikube’s VM:
$ minikube stop
Delete the Minikube’s VM:
$ minikube delete