Minikube is a tool that lets you test and develops Kubernetes applications on a single node on your local workstation. You need Minikube if you want an easy and convenient approach to test and build applications on a local Kubernetes cluster without disrupting other systems or applications. It supports a number of hypervisors and offers a low-cost, isolated environment for testing and development.

In this article, let's look at how we can set up Minikube for MacOS

Step 1: Install Homebrew

Homebrew, a popular package manager for macOS, can be used to install Minikube. Run the following command in your terminal if Homebrew isn't already installed on your device:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Step 2: Install Minikube

To install Minikube, run the following command in your terminal using Homebrew:

brew install minikube

Step 3: Start Minikube

You can start Minikube by running the following command in your terminal:

minikube start

If you have a Docker machine installed in your MacOS, you might get the following error while executing the above command. To solve this issue , you need to start the Docker desktop application and rerun the command.

  Exiting due to DRV_DOCKER_NOT_RUNNING: Found docker, but the docker service isn't running. Try restarting the docker service.

Step 4: Set Context

Now you need to set the context to minikube so that the kubectl command can interact with it:

kubectl config use-context minikube

Step 5: Verify Minikube Setup

Now you can verify the status of Minikube using the following command in your terminal:

minikube status

Step 6: Interacting with Cluster

To interact with the newly created cluster in your MacOS, you need to run the following command in your terminal if you have kubectl already installed :

kubectl get po -A

But, if you don't have kubectl installed on your MacOS, then run the following command where minikube can download the appropriate kubectl version:

minikube kubectl -- get po -A

Step 7: Testing Minikube

Now, we can test the minikube by deploying a simple application by following the command in the terminal:

kubectl create deployment hello-minikube --image=kicbase/echo-server:1.0
kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=NodePort --port=8080

This might take some time but if you run the following command, the deployment will show up:

kubectl get services hello-minikube

Letting Minikube open a web browser for you is the simplest approach to using this service. To do that run the following command in the terminal:

minikube service hello-minikube

Step 8: Access Kubernetes Dashboard

To access the dashboard of Kubernetes, you need to run the following command which will open a Kubernetes dashboard on the web browser with a user-friendly interface:

minikube dashboard

Conclusion:

In this article, we have learned about Minikube and how to set it up on MacOS with a step-by-step process.

I hope this article has helped you to explore Minikube's capabilities for testing and deploying applications on a single node of a Kubernetes cluster.

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