Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your local machine. Kubernetes quickly set up a local Kubernetes cluster on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
It is always advisable before diving into Kubernetes, you will need a minimal Kubernetes setup. Such a setup should spin up fast and integrate well with other tools.
Minikube is the best fit because of the following:
- It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS.
- It supports the latest Kubernetes release
- It supports multiple container runtimes i.e Containerd, KVM, Docker, Podman etc
- It has supports for adbvanced features such as Load balancing, Featuregates and filesystems mounts.
- It has support for Addons. Addons being a marketplace for developers to share configurations for running services on Minikube.
- It supports CI environments
Prerequisites
To run Kubernetes effectively you need to allocate the following to Minikube on your system.
- 2 CPUs or more
- 2 GB of memory
- 20 GB or more of free disk space
- Reliable internet connections.
- Conatiner or virtual machine manager such as Docker, KVM, Podman, Virtual Box etc.
Related Articles
- How to install and use Minikube on Fedora 35
- How to install Oracle VirtualBox 6.1 on Ubuntu 21.04
- How to install Podman 3 on Debian 11
- How to install Docker on Arch Linux
Install Minikube on Ubuntu 21.10
Let’s now dive into installing and playing with Kubernetes. I am going to be using Docker for running Kubernetes, You can spin up using Podman, Virtualbox, or KVM whichever you understand well.
1. Run system updates
To make our repositories up to date run total system updates with the following command;
$ sudo apt update && apt upgrade -y
2. Install Docker on Ubuntu 21.10
Docker container acts as a base for installing Minikube. Kubernetes depends on docker to run. So use the following command to install docker if you have not already installed it. For complete docker install check this out.
$ sudo apt install docker.io
Once installed, add your local user to it because Minikube doesn’t run as a root.
Lets add new user with the following command.
$ useradd --create-home nextgentips
$ sudo usermod -aG docker nextgentips
3. Download Minikube
We are going to download the Minikube binary from the Minikube Library.
$ curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube
Now that we have installed Minikube, you can check the version of it with the following command.
$ minikube version
minikube version: v1.24.0
commit: 76b94fb3c4e8ac5062daf70d60cf03ddcc0a741b
You now need to install kubectl
4. Install Kubectl
Kubectl is a command-line tool for controlling Kubernetes clusters. To install kubectl run the following command.
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/`curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt`/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl
make sure you make it executable with the following command.
$ chmod +x ./kubectl
Then you will have to move it in your $PATH
sudo mv ./kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl
5. Start Minikube on Ubuntu 21.10
To start minikube run minikube start command.
$ minikube start
You will get the following output.
Output
minikube v1.24.0 on Ubuntu 21.10 (kvm/amd64)
* Automatically selected the docker driver
X The requested memory allocation of 1977MiB does not leave room for system overhead (total system memory: 1977MiB). You may face stability issues.
* Suggestion: Start minikube with less memory allocated: 'minikube start --memory=1977mb'
* Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
* Pulling base image ...
* Downloading Kubernetes v1.22.3 preload ...
> preloaded-images-k8s-v13-v1...: 501.73 MiB / 501.73 MiB 100.00% 154.31 M
> gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase: 355.78 MiB / 355.78 MiB 100.00% 19.26 MiB p
* Creating docker container (CPUs=2, Memory=1977MB) ...
* Preparing Kubernetes v1.22.3 on Docker 20.10.8 ...
- Generating certificates and keys ...
- Booting up control plane ...
- Configuring RBAC rules ...
* Verifying Kubernetes components...
- Using image gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner:v5
* Enabled addons: default-storageclass, storage-provisioner
* kubectl not found. If you need it, try: 'minikube kubectl -- get pods -A'
* Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default
Check basic Minikube commands
Check Minikube cluster-info
$ kubectl cluster-info
Output
Kubernetes control plane is running at https://192.168.49.2:8443
CoreDNS is running at https://192.168.49.2:8443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy
To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.
Conclusion
We have successfully installed Minikube on Ubuntu 21.10. For more information check Minikube documentation.