minikube

What is minikube?

minikube implements a local Kubernetes cluster on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

minikube's primary goals are to be the best tool for local Kubernetes application development and to support all Kubernetes features that fit. We hope you enjoy it!

News

• 2019-04-29 - v1.0.1 released! [download] [release notes]
• 2019-03-27 - v1.0.0 released! [download] [release notes]

Features

minikube runs the official stable release of Kubernetes, with support for standard Kubernetes features like:

• LoadBalancer - using minikube tunnel
• Multi-cluster - using minikube start -p <name>
• NodePorts - using minikube service
• Persistent Volumes
• Ingress
• RBAC
• Dashboard - minikube dashboard
• Container runtimes - start --container-runtime
• Configure apiserver and kubelet options via command-line flags

As well as developer-friendly features:

• Addons - a marketplace for developers to share configurations for running services on minikube
• GPU support - for machine learning
• Filesystem mounts
• Automatic failure analysis

Documentation

• Installation
• Advanced Topics and Tutorials
• Contributors Guide

Community

minikube is a Kubernetes #sig-cluster-lifecycle project.

• #minikube on Kubernetes Slack - Live chat with minikube developers!

• minikube-users mailing list

• minikube-dev mailing list

• Bi-weekly office hours, Mondays @ 10am PST

• Contributing

• Development Roadmap

Installation

See the installation guide. For the impatient, here is the TL;DR:

• macOS 10.12 (Sierra)

  • Requires installing a hypervisor, such as hyperkit (recommended) or VirtualBox
  • using brew: brew cask install minikube
  • manually: curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-darwin-amd64 && sudo install minikube-darwin-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

• Windows 10

  • Requires a hypervisor, such as VirtualBox (recommended) or HyperV
  • VT-x/AMD-v virtualization must be enabled in BIOS
  • using chocolatey choco install minikube
  • manually: Download and run the installer

• Linux

  • Requires either the kvm2 driver (recommended), or VirtualBox
  • VT-x/AMD-v virtualization must be enabled in BIOS
  • manually: curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64 && sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

Supported Hypervisors

minikube start defaults to virtualbox, but supports other drivers using the --vm-driver argument:

• KVM2 - Recommended Linux driver
• hyperkit - Recommended macOS driver
• virtualbox - Recommended Windows driver
• none - bare-metal execution on Linux, at the expense of system security and reliability

Other drivers which are not yet part of our continuous integration system are:

• hyperv
• vmware

Quick Start

Start a cluster by running:

minikube start

Access Kubernetes Dashboard within Minikube:

minikube dashboard

Once started, you can interact with your cluster using kubectl, just like any other Kubernetes cluster. For instance, starting a server:

kubectl run hello-minikube --image=k8s.gcr.io/echoserver:1.4 --port=8080

Exposing a service as a NodePort

kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=NodePort

minikube makes it easy to open this exposed endpoint in your browser:

minikube service hello-minikube

Start a second local cluster:

minikube start -p cluster2

Stop your local cluster:

minikube stop

Delete your local cluster:

minikube delete