Minikube Quick Start Guide

Christopher Lo is a Senior Software Engineer with LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Chris has been with the company since 2007, starting out in the QA department and progressing to his current role as the primary tester for the HPCC Systems Platform Research and Development team. Having a strong commitment to quality and through his collaborative work with operations, he has become one of the QA leads for the HPCC Systems development team.  He earned his Bachelors from University of Florida and his Masters in Computer Science from FAU.

The following are the steps Chris takes when running Hyper V on Windows.

*****************************************************************

You could just as easily run with Virtualbox as the virtualization engine, but using Hyper-V allows for you to use WSL if you’d like.

1. Install Minikube Here

The default selected options for downloading minikube work great for me.

Operating System: Windows

Architecture: x86-64

Release type: Stable

Installer type: .exe download

As the Minikube install guide says, Administrator access to Powershell is needed.  This is so that you can add the minikube binary to the system’s PATH for ease of use.

2. Install Chocolatey Here

Chocolately makes things a bit simpler as you can use it for installing both kubectl and helm.  This isn’t a strict requirement, but one I would definitely suggest.

3. Install kubectl Here

Kubectl is going to be necessary for you to navigate around your container based system and get information from your pods.  The steps listed in that guide should be rather straightforward.

4. Install Helm Here

If you’ve followed step 2 to install Chocolatey, then you should have a rather easy time installing helm.  The link listed will guide you to the most accurate command to use for installing helm on your systems.

Should you not want to install Chocolatey, then the site also lists several other options.

5. Setting up Hyper-V

After installing minikube, you should make sure Hyper-V is properly set up on your machine by checking it here.

Doing all three suggestions listed in that Document might be necessary to ensure that Hyper-V is enabled properly.

Now that we’ve gotten the ground work laid out, we can run a test to see if minikube can utilize Hyper-V as the virtualization driver.

Running this is easy.  Inside Powershell, run the following command:

minikube start --vm-driver=hyperv

You should get a message like this if it’s successful:

! minikube v1.6.2 on Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 10.0.19044 Build 19044

* Selecting ‘hyperv’ driver from user configuration (alternates: [virtualbox])

* Creating hyperv VM (CPUs=2, Memory=2000MB, Disk=20000MB) …

* Preparing Kubernetes v1.17.0 on Docker ‘19.03.5’ …

* Pulling images …

* Launching Kubernetes …

* Waiting for cluster to come online …

* Done! kubectl is now configured to use “minikube”

! C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\bin\kubectl.exe is version 1.22.2, and is incompatible with Kubernetes 1.17.0. You will need to update C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\bin\kubectl.exe or use ‘minikube kubectl’ to connect with this cluster

For another sanity test, you can rerun some of the simple commands suggested in Step 3 of the minikube installation guide listed above.

Next step is to download the helm repository and get going.