Installing Minikube

Minikube is a local Virtual Machine with Kubernetes that runs locally, and you can use it just like you’d use a remote Kubernetes cluster.

You’ll need to download and install:

• VirtualBox We find this is the best virtual machine to use with minikube.
• Minikube

Setup

Run the following to give your VM enough juice (Magda requires at least 6GB ram to deploy all modules) to run Magda and start it up:

minikube config set memory 6144
minikube config set cpus 2
minikube config set vm-driver virtualbox
minikube start

This reserves 6 GB of RAM for Minikube and starts it up. If you’re low on RAM and only intend to run the databases on Minikube, you can likely get away with a smaller number, like 2048.

More detailed instructions for setting up Minikube can be found here if that doesn’t work.

To set up the environment variables necessary for Docker to interact with the Minikube VM, run:

eval $(minikube docker-env)

You’ll need to run this in each new shell.

Minikube on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

A few notes for setting up Minikube in a WSL environment:

• Install minikube for Windows (not the Linux version in WSL, it won’t work).
• Install docker and kubectl in WSL.
• Create a simple bash script named minikube to run the Windows version of minikube and put it in your path in your WSL environment:

#!/bin/sh
/mnt/c/Program\ Files/Kubernetes/Minikube/minikube.exe $@

• Start minikube (from Windows or WSL is fine) by running minikube start
• The above will configure Windows kubectl to be able to talk to Kubernetes in minikube, but the kubectl in WSL won’t work. To fix that, open %userprofile%\.kube\config in a text editor and copy all the minikube context, cluster, and user from there into ~/.kube/config in your WSL environment.
• Create another bash script named minikube-go in your WSL path to configure WSL Docker to talk to minikube:

#!/bin/sh
eval $(minikube docker-env --shell=bash)
export DOCKER_CERT_PATH=$(wslpath -u "${DOCKER_CERT_PATH}")

• Run the minikube-go in each new WSL terminal, instead of the eval $(minikube docker-env) in the instructions above: source minikube-go.