Minikube is a very convenient tool for users looking to try out Kubernetes, or develop with it day-to-day.

For the most recent information on Minikube see the Running Kubernetes Locally via Minikube tutorial.

Overview

The major components of a complete Minikube installation are:

  • hypervisor
  • kubectl
  • Minikube

Hypervisor

Minikube requires a hypervisor. Depending on your OS platform you may install your hypervisor of choice. By default Minikube requires VirtualBox as its hypervisor. Discussing the pros and cons of various hypervisors is beyond the scope of this article. Here are the Minikube supported hypervisors, based on OS platform.

VirtualBox | KVM

VirtualBox | VMware Fusion | HyperKit

On Mac OS X my hypervisor of choice is VMware Fusion and I'll show how to configure Minikube with the related hypervisor driver (in the Minikube Configuration section of this article).

VirtualBox | Hyper-V

kubectl

kubectl is a CLI tool for interacting with a Kubernetes cluster manager.

For the most recent information on how to install kubectl see the Install and Set Up kubectl tutorial.

TBD

On Mac OS X kubectl and kubernetes-cli are used interchangeably. You need Homebrew to install the required package(s).

Install the kubectl CLI:

brew install kubectl

To upgrade your existing kubectl installation:

brew upgrade kubectl

Test kubectl (see the Troubleshooting section if you encounter errors):

kubectl version

TBD

Minikube

You need a hypervisor installed before proceeding with the Minikube installation. See the Hypervisor section for more information.

For the most recent information on how to setup Minikube see the Install Minikube tutorial.

TBD

You need Homebrew to install the required package(s).

Install minikube:

brew install minikube

To upgrade your existing minikube installation:

brew upgrade minikube

Test minikube (see the Troubleshooting section if you encounter errors):

minikube version
minikube status

TBD

Configuration

This section focuses on Minikube configuration settings, some of them subject to performance tuning.

vm-driver

The vm-driver configuration attribute specifies the hypervisor used by Minikube. To list the current hypervisor driver used by Minikube, run the following (or similar) command:

cat ~/.minikube/machines/minikube/config.json | jq '.DriverName'

The default hypervisor driver installed with Minikube is virtualbox. This requires of course to have VirtualBox installed on your system (before installing Minikube). Depending on the hypervisor of choice one could set a different vm-driver for Minikube. If the preferred hypervisor is VMware Fusion (e.g. on Mac OS X), here are the steps for changing the related Minikube configuration:

minikube config set vm-driver vmwarefusion
minikube delete
minikube start

Of course, for the configuration change above to work, one should have VMware Fusion installed (e.g. on Mac OS X).

Troubleshooting

This section describes certain error conditions and how to remedy them, when running Minikube.

kubectl: Unable to connect to the server

You may get this error message with an arbitrary kubectl command (e.g. kubectl version) if Minikube is not running (or started). Check the running status of  Minikube:

minikube status

If Minikube is running, the command above would have an output similar to:

minikube: Running
cluster: Running
kubectl: Correctly Configured: pointing to minikube-vm at 192.168.99.100

Otherwise you can try to start Minikube:

minikube start