Getting Started with Minikube

Local Kubernetes installation

There are several tools that can be used to deploy Kubernetes on one or many clusters. Some of them include:

Minikube is the easiest and preferred method for setting up Kubernetes locally. It is used to manage a single-node cluster, although there is already an experimental feature that supports multi-node clusters.

Minikube

The minikube project is a local Kubernetes cluster implementation for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its goal is to be the best tool for local Kubernetes application development ¹.

The first steps with minikube can be found in the official documentation and are as follows ²:

Requirements

2 CPUs or more
2GB of RAM
20GB of disk space
Internet connection
Container or virtual machine manager, such as: Docker, Hyperkit, Hyper-V, KVM, Parallels, Podman, VirtualBox, or VMware.

Installing minikube

For Linux there are three options:

Binary package:

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 curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
 sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

Debian package:

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curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube_latest_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i minikube_latest_amd64.deb

RPM package:

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curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-latest.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh minikube-latest.x86_64.rpm

To start minikube, run:

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minikube start

To stop minikube safely, run:

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minikube stop

Installing Kubernetes

Kubernetes can be installed locally on virtual machines or directly on the operating system. Tools such as Ansible or kubeadm can be used to automate the installation.

The CLI tool kubectl can be used to manage, deploy, and configure the resources and applications of the Minikube cluster, and can be installed with the following commands:

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sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https gnupg2 curl
curl -s https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y kubectl

For details on kubectl commands, you can refer to the kubectl book, the official Kubernetes documentation, or its GitHub repository.

A common step after installation is to configure and enable kubectl command autocompletion:

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sudo apt install -y bash-completion
source /usr/share/bash-completion/bash-completion
source <(kubectl completion bash)
echo 'source <(kubectl completion bash)' >>~/.bashrc

Other relevant packages to install include:

kubeadm: used for managing or automating the installation
kubelet: an agent that runs on each node and communicates with the control plane components
kubernetes-cni: allows configuring network elements

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sudo apt-get install kubelet kubeadm kubernetes-cni