Minikube Cheat Sheet

How to set up Kubernetes on your local machine fast using Minikube.

Please note that this is not a guide. This is a cheat sheet. It would contain a list of commands, not a list of explanations. If you wanted more details, please check the article by Romin Irani which I based this from.

Install Requirements:

Docker Toolbox

Minikube

Kubectl

Note: Please make sure your Hyper-V is disabled. Docker Toolbox uses Virtual Box and VB doesn’t play nicely if your Hyper-V is enabled.

Install Docker Toolbox.

Minikube and Kubectl are console applications, so you don’t really need to install these. Just download and place them in some folder. Better still, add it to your path so you can run them anywhere.

We need this to get a list of Kubernetes versions Minikube currently supports.

minikube get-k8s-versions

Let’s start Minikube. But change the kubernetes-version to the latest. As of this writing, it’s v1.7.0 (your kubectl version must also be the same as this).

minikube.exe start --kubernetes-version="v1.7.0" --vm-driver="virtualbox" --show-libmachine-logs --alsologtostderr

Let’s see our kubectl version

kubectl version

Assuming your Minikube starts up well. We can now issue kubectl commands to it.

kubectl cluster-info

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems

kubectl cluster-info dump

If you simply want to get the IP address of your cluster.

minikube ip

And finally, the dashboard. My favorite part, simply because once you get to see it, it means your minikube setup is working as expected.

minikube dashboard 
or if just want the url:
minikube dashboard --url=true

or

Launch your Kubernetes dashboard with the default port 8001.
Set the proxy with the default port number.

kubectl proxy

then you can access the dashboard by appending it with /ui

http://localhost:8001/ui

Who would imagine a simple console application can give you a web based dashboard like that? Actually, if you watch minikube when it was starting up, you notice it downloading a bunch files? The dashboard is part of it, among other things.

Your Minikube setup is done. From this point on, most of the commands you will use will be kubectl.

Let’s start by getting a list of nodes.

kubectl get nodes

Now let’s run some app

kubectl run hello-nginx --image=nginx --port=80

What’s image=nginx? That’s actually a docker image. Docker will get it automatically for you.

expose

kubectl expose deployment hello-nginx --type=NodePort

get the url

minikube service --url=true hello-nginx

This is just a convenience provided by minikube, but in production, you should rely on kubectl to get url.

Let’s get the nodes, so we can get the public IP address.

kubectl get nodes

Now we have the IP, all we need is the port number.

kubectl get svc

you will see something like

NAME          CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)        AGE
hello-nginx   10.10.10.207   <nodes>       80:31019/TCP   24m

In this case, the public port is 31019. You can now form the url by

<node ip>:31019

scale it

kubectl scale --replicas=3 deployment/hello-nginx

get deployment status

kubectl get deployment

Miscellaneous/Issues/Etc…:

There are times that minikube IP changes.

When I run: minikube status, it says misconfigured

minikube: Running
localkube: Running
kubectl: Misconfigured: pointing to stale minikube-vm.

You can use:

minikube update-context

Settings

This is where the config used by kubectl is located. This is how it knows which cluster to talk to. In production environments, there would be a lot of clusters. In our case, we just have one cluster created by minikube.

%HOMEPATH%\.kube

This is the folder minikube uses. It contains everything, settings, the virtual box machine image, ssl certs, etc…

%HOMEPATH%\.minikube

Pay attention to this file disk.vmdk. This file would grow in size because all the apps you deploy goes into this machine image.

%HOMEPATH%\.minikube\disk.vmdk

To be continued…