Minikube Cheatsheet

I use minikube for local development of application on Kubernetes. It is pretty straightforward and simple to use. However, there are some commands that are best to be documented so I’m not always looking for it.

General Notes

Docker with Kubernetes or Minikube

I originally thought Docker with Kubernetes would be a good thing, in December 2021, when I was working on this, but there are some weird issues with Kubernetes’ shared volume mounts where it is asking the root directory / to be a shared mount. It didn’t make sense to me, and no matter what I did, I was not able to fix it.

I think the best solution is to use minikube. It’s default driver is docker, so it downloads Kubernetes images and installs Kubernetes inside docker, and then you deploy into it. You can also use any of the following drivers, but the default driver of docker, out of the box setup, works well:

• virtualbox
• parallels
• vmwarefusion
• hyperkit
• vmware
• docker
• podman

Starting up minikube

Make sure Docker Desktop is already running, and then run:

minikube start

Stopping minikube

minikube stop

Pointing Docker Daemon to minikube

By default, docker cli points to the local Docker instance on your machine when it builds images. However, if we want Kubernetes that minikube is using to use images that docker built, we need the Docker Daemon to point to minikube.

To do this, simply run the following command before running docker build:

eval $(minikube -p minikube docker-env)

This should change your environment variables temporarily to allow for docker build to point to minikube.

If you want the docker daemon to always point to minikube, add eval $(minikube -p minikube docker-env) to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file.