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Minikube

Minimum system requirements for minikube

  • 2 GB RAM or more
  • 2 CPU / vCPUs or more
  • 20 GB free hard disk space or more
  • Docker / Virtual Machine Manager – KVM & VirtualBox. Docker, Hyperkit, Hyper-V, KVM, Parallels, Podman, VirtualBox, or VMWare are examples of container or virtual machine managers.

Pre-requisite

We will need 1 VM to create a single node kubernetes cluster using minikube. We are using following setting for this purpose:

  • 1 Linux machine for master, ubuntu-22.04-x86_64 or your choice of Ubuntu OS image, cpu-a.2 flavor with 2vCPU, 4GB RAM, 20GB storage - also assign Floating IP to this VM.
  • setup Unique hostname to the machine using the following command:
echo "<node_internal_IP> <host_name>" >> /etc/hosts
hostnamectl set-hostname <host_name>

For example,

echo "192.168.0.62 minikube" >> /etc/hosts
hostnamectl set-hostname minikube

Install Minikube on Ubuntu

Run the below command on the Ubuntu VM:

  • SSH into minikube machine

  • Switch to root user: sudo su

  • Update the repositories and packages:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y
  • Install curl, wget, and apt-transport-https
apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl wget apt-transport-https

Install Docker

  • Install container runtime - docker
sudo apt-get install docker.io -y
  • Configure the Docker daemon, in particular to use systemd for the management of the container’s cgroups
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/docker/daemon.json
{
"exec-opts": ["native.cgroupdriver=systemd"]
}
EOF

systemctl enable --now docker
usermod -aG docker ubuntu
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart docker

OR, you can install VirtualBox Hypervisor as runtime:

sudo apt install virtualbox virtualbox-ext-pack -y

Install kubectl

  • Install kubectl binary • kubectl: the command line util to talk to your cluster.
snap install kubectl --classic

This outputs: kubectl 1.22.2 from Canonical✓ installed

  • Now verify the kubectl version:
kubectl version -o yaml

Installing minikube

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

OR, install minikube using wget:

wget https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
cp minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/bin/minikube
chmod +x /usr/bin/minikube
  • Verify the Minikube installation:
minikube version

minikube version: v1.23.2
commit: 0a0ad764652082477c00d51d2475284b5d39ceed
  • Install conntrack: Kubernetes 1.22.2 requires conntrack to be installed in root's path:
apt-get install -y conntrack
  • Start minikube: As we are already stated in the beginning that we would be using docker as base for minikue, so start the minikube with the docker driver,
minikube start --driver=none

Note

  • To check the internal IP, run the minikube ip command.
  • By default, Minikube uses the driver most relevant to the host OS. To use a different driver, set the --driver flag in minikube start. For example, to use Docker instead of others or none, run minikube start --driver=docker. To persistent configuration so that you to run minikube start without explicitly passing i.e. in global scope the --vm-driver docker flag each time, run: minikube config set vm-driver docker.
  • In case you want to start minikube with customize resources and want installer to automatically select the driver then you can run following command, minikube start --addons=ingress --cpus=2 --cni=flannel --install-addons=true --kubernetes-version=stable --memory=6g

Output would like below: Minikube sucessfully started

Perfect, above confirms that minikube cluster has been configured and started successfully.

  • Run below minikube command to check status:
minikube status

minikube
type: Control Plane
host: Running
kubelet: Running
apiserver: Running
kubeconfig: Configured
  • Run following kubectl command to verify the cluster info and node status:
kubectl cluster-info

Kubernetes control plane is running at https://192.168.0.62:8443
CoreDNS is running at https://192.168.0.62:8443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy

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

kubectl get nodes

NAME       STATUS   ROLES                  AGE   VERSION
minikube   Ready    control-plane,master   5m    v1.22.2
  • To see the kubectl configuration use the command:
kubectl config view

The output looks like: Minikube config view

  • Get minikube addon details:
minikube addons list

The output will display like below: Minikube addons list

If you wish to enable any addons run the below minikube command,

minikube addons enable <addon-name>
  • Enable minikube dashboard addon:
minikube dashboard

🔌  Enabling dashboard ...
    ▪ Using image kubernetesui/metrics-scraper:v1.0.7
    ▪ Using image kubernetesui/dashboard:v2.3.1
🤔  Verifying dashboard health ...
🚀  Launching proxy ...
🤔  Verifying proxy health ...
http://127.0.0.1:40783/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/http:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/
  • To view minikube dashboard url:
minikube dashboard --url

🤔  Verifying dashboard health ...
🚀  Launching proxy ...
🤔  Verifying proxy health ...
http://127.0.0.1:42669/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/http:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/
  • Expose Dashboard on NodePort instead of ClusterIP:

-- Check the current port for kubernetes-dashboard:

kubectl get services -n kubernetes-dashboard

The output looks like below: Current ClusterIP for Minikube Dashboard

kubectl edit service kubernetes-dashboard -n kubernetes-dashboard

-- Replace type: "ClusterIP" to "NodePort":

Current Dashboard Type

-- After saving the file: Test again: kubectl get services -n kubernetes-dashboard

Now the output should look like below: Current NodePort for Minikube Dashboard

So, now you can browser the K8s Dashboard, visit http://<Floating-IP>:<NodePort> i.e. http://140.247.152.235:31881 to view the Dashboard.

Deploy A Sample Nginx Application

  • Create a deployment, in this case Nginx: A Kubernetes Pod is a group of one or more Containers, tied together for the purposes of administration and networking. The Pod in this tutorial has only one Container. A Kubernetes Deployment checks on the health of your Pod and restarts the Pod's Container if it terminates. Deployments are the recommended way to manage the creation and scaling of Pods.

  • Let's check if the Kubernetes cluster is up and running:

kubectl get all --all-namespaces
kubectl get po -A
kubectl get nodes

kubectl create deployment --image nginx my-nginx
  • To access the deployment we will need to expose it:
kubectl expose deployment my-nginx --port=80 --type=NodePort

To check which NodePort is opened and running the Nginx run:

kubectl get svc

The output will show: Minikube Running Services

OR,

minikube service list

|----------------------|---------------------------|--------------|-------------|
|      NAMESPACE       |           NAME            | TARGET PORT  |       URL   |
|----------------------|---------------------------|--------------|-------------|
| default              | kubernetes                | No node port |
| default              | my-nginx                  |           80 | http:.:31081|
| kube-system          | kube-dns                  | No node port |
| kubernetes-dashboard | dashboard-metrics-scraper | No node port |
| kubernetes-dashboard | kubernetes-dashboard      |           80 | http:.:31929|
|----------------------|---------------------------|--------------|-------------|

OR,

kubectl get svc my-nginx
minikube service my-nginx --url

Once the deployment is up, you should be able to access the Nginx home page on the allocated NodePort from the node's Floating IP.

Go to browser, visit http://<Floating-IP>:<NodePort> i.e. http://140.247.152.235:31081/ to check the nginx default page.

For your example,

nginx default page

Deploy A Hello Minikube Application

  • Use the kubectl create command to create a Deployment that manages a Pod. The Pod runs a Container based on the provided Docker image.
kubectl create deployment hello-minikube --image=k8s.gcr.io/echoserver:1.4
kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=NodePort --port=8080
  • View the port information:
kubectl get svc hello-minikube
minikube service hello-minikube --url

Go to browser, visit http://<Floating-IP>:<NodePort> i.e. http://140.247.152.235:31293/ to check the hello minikube default page.

For your example,

Hello Minikube default page

Clean up

Now you can clean up the app resources you created in your cluster:

kubectl delete service my-nginx
kubectl delete deployment my-nginx

kubectl delete service hello-minikube
kubectl delete deployment hello-minikube

Managing Minikube Cluster

  • To stop the minikube, run
minikube stop
  • To delete the single node cluster:
minikube delete
  • To Start the minikube, run
minikube start
  • In case you want to start the minikube with higher resource like 8 GB RM and 4 CPU then execute following commands one after the another.
minikube config set cpus 4
minikube config set memory 8192
minikube delete
minikube start