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Local Development Environment Setup for Kubernetes using Minikube

By Samir Behara on April 26, 2018 • ( 2 )

Kubernetes is an orchestrator for microservice apps running on containers. It is open source and automates the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.

For your local development purpose you might not want to interact with the K8s cluster hosted in Cloud & spend additional dollars. Also debugging can be challenging if you do not have services running locally. So in that case, as the initial step — you can build your docker image and test it locally first by deploying into Minikube.

I have created a video tutorial to setup a local development environment for K8s using Minikube. I will walk you through how to perform the required installations to create a running K8s cluster locally. We will then deploy an app using the K8s CLI. Once done, we will explore the deployed application and environments.

Minikube is a tool that allows you to run a single-node K8s cluster locally. Minikube starts a VM and runs the necessary K8s components. Once the K8s cluster is up, you can interact with it using the K8s CLI – kubectl.

Kubectl is used for running commands to deploy and manage components against your K8s instance. Minikube also configures kubectl for you.

You can find below the scripts used in the demonstration —

	// Install Minikube
	brew cask install minikube

	// Verify that minikube is properly installed
	minikube version

	// Install the Kubernetes Command Line Utility – kubectl
	brew install kubectl

	// Start Minikube
	minikube start

	// Check Minikube status
	minikube status

	// View Kubernetes Dashboard
	minikube dashboard

	// View Kubernetes Cluster Information
	kubectl cluster-info

	// View the nodes that can be used to host your applications
	kubectl get nodes

	// Create a new deployment
	kubectl run hello-minikube –image=k8s.gcr.io/echoserver:1.4 –port=8080

	// List the deployments
	kubectl get deployments

	// Expose the deployment to an external IP
	kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube –type=NodePort

	// View the K8s services
	kubectl get services

	// View the URL that you can hit via browser
	minikube service hello-minikube –url

	// View the K8s pods in the cluster
	kubectl get pods

	// View the details of a specific resource
	kubectl describe svc hello-minikube

	// Delete the service and deployment
	kubectl delete service,deployment hello-minikube

	// Shut down the Minikube cluster
	minikube stop