minikube

What is minikube?

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

Our goal is to enable fast local development and to support all Kubernetes features that fit. We hope you enjoy it!

News

• 2019-02-16 - v0.34.1 released! [download] [release notes]
• 2019-02-15 - v0.34.0 released! [download] [release notes]
• 2019-01-18 - v0.33.1 released to address CVE-2019-5736 [download] [release notes]
• 2019-01-17 - v0.33.0 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

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