minikube wrapper – kubernetes

What is minikube?

Minikube was developed to allow users to run Kubernetes LOCALLY. When you run minikube it will launch a minikube host as a container/VM depending on the driver and runs a single-node k8s cluster.

Why minikube?

Previously whenever I needed to test anything in the kubernetes environment I would stand up a full suite of servers 4 actually, 3 workers and 1 master node on a VM and it was very time-consuming to set up and use and also resource-intensive for my tiny home lab. I needed a way to create an environment fast and make it re-producible for testing purposes. LOCALLY is in CAPS above to show that the minikube environment is only accessible from the host that runs minikube and will not be accessible via the LAN, so it’s best to run it from a workstation such as macOS or a Linux workstation capable of running GUI for a browser. You can run it from a Linux server without a GUI but you would need to ssh tunnel to get to the external IP’s assigned to various services.
If you are interested in installing vanilla k8s on bare-metal you can look on my old post.

For this article I will be using docker driver for linux and hyperkit for macOS, for some of you, you might have virtualbox already installed and you can use that as your driver or any of the other drivers that minikube supports. The wrapper will not install docker in linux, however it is very easy to install docker. hyperkit comes installed on macOS so nothing else is needed.

The WRAPPER!

I created a wrapper script to automate minikube so that once the startup is done your k8s environment is ready to go with a LoadBalancer with a pool of IP and a default storageClass for storage.

• The wrapper will install minikube and kubectl if its not installed
• The wrapper has options to start/stop/delete the minikube environment
• The wrapper will auto detect CPU cores and memory and use half of your systems resources. You can overwrite this by editing the script and adding your own settings in the user editable section

Install

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jlim0930/scripts/master/kube.sh -o kube.sh
$ chmod +x kube.sh

Run

$ ./kube.sh start # starts the minikube environment might prompt you for sudo password

If you want to set a hard limit for CPU and memory you can edit kube.sh to set it or else it will set CPU to be half of your total # of cores and memory as half of your total memory up to 16GB. It will create a LoadBalancer IP pool which can be used for your deployments to be accessed locally. It will also create a default storageClass. Since this script creates the storageClass and LoadBalancer your kubernetes environment will be more like something you will find on most cloud providers. After this command is finished your kubernetes environment is up and running and ready to deploy your deployments for various projects.

Cleanup

$ ./kube.sh delete # deletes minikube environment

minikube & kubectl cheatsheet

Lets Play!

run kube.sh

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jlim0930/scripts/master/kube.sh -o kube.sh
$ ./kube.sh start
[DEBUG] minikube found.
[DEBUG] kubectl found.
[DEBUG] build minikube
[DEBUG] CPU will be set to 4 cores
❗  These changes will take effect upon a minikube delete and then a minikube start
[DEBUG] MEM will be set to 16005mb
❗  These changes will take effect upon a minikube delete and then a minikube start
😄  minikube v1.19.0 on Centos 7.9.2009
✨  Using the docker driver based on existing profile
👍  Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
🏃  Updating the running docker "minikube" container ...
🐳  Preparing Kubernetes v1.20.2 on Docker 20.10.5 ...
🔎  Verifying Kubernetes components...
    ▪ Using image metallb/speaker:v0.8.2
    ▪ Using image metallb/controller:v0.8.2
    ▪ Using image gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner:v5
🌟  Enabled addons: storage-provisioner, metallb, default-storageclass
🏄  Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default
    ▪ Using image metallb/speaker:v0.8.2
    ▪ Using image metallb/controller:v0.8.2
🌟  The 'metallb' addon is enabled
[DEBUG] minikube IP is: 192.168.49.2
[DEBUG] LoadBalancer Pool: 192.168.49.150 - 192.168.49.175

So what just happened? the script checked for minikube and kubectl binary and if not installed installed it. Set the # of cores and memroy and started the minikube environment. On linux it defaults to dockers and for macos it defaults to hyperkit(the default virtualization built into macos). Configured the loadbalancer and echoed out the pool.

$ kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes control plane is running at https://192.168.49.2:8443
KubeDNS 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'.

$ minikube status
minikube
type: Control Plane
host: Running
kubelet: Running
apiserver: Running
kubeconfig: Configured

If you want to look at your k8s dashboard you can run minikube dashboard and it will open a browser with the dashboard loaded. Please use another tab to run this since you will need the session alive to view the dashboard.

Thats a wrap!

Your k8s environment is up now so you can start with your k8s projects!