Setting Up Minikube on Ubuntu: A Step-by-Step Guide

Introduction

Minikube is a powerful tool that allows you to run Kubernetes locally. It provides a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your local machine. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to set up and use Minikube on a machine running Ubuntu.

Prerequisites

A computer running Ubuntu 18.04 or higher
A minimum of 2 GB of RAM
VirtualBox or similar virtualization software installed

Step 1: Installing Minikube

To begin with, we need to install Minikube on our Ubuntu machine. First, download the latest Minikube binary:

curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64

Now, make the binary executable and move it to your path:

chmod +x minikube
sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/

Step 2: Installing kubectl kubectl is the command line tool for interacting with a Kubernetes cluster. Install it with the following commands:

curl -LO "https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/$(curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
chmod +x kubectl
sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/

Step 3: Starting Minikube To start your single-node Kubernetes cluster, just run:

minikube start

After the command completes, your cluster should be up and running. You can interact with it using the kubectl command.

Step 4: Interacting with Your Cluster To interact with your cluster, you use the kubectl command. For example, to view the nodes in your cluster, run:

kubectl get nodes

Step 5: Deploying an Application To deploy an application on your Minikube cluster, you can use a simple YAML file. For example, let’s deploy a simple Nginx server:

kubectl create deployment nginx --image=nginx

Step 6: Accessing Your Application To access your newly deployed Nginx server, you need to expose it as a service:

kubectl expose deployment nginx --type=NodePort --port=80
Then, you can find the URL to access the service with:
```bash
minikube service nginx --url

Conclusion In this guide, we have demonstrated how to set up Minikube on an Ubuntu machine and deploy a simple Nginx server on the local Kubernetes cluster. With Minikube, you can develop and test your Kubernetes applications locally before moving to a production environment.

Happy Kubernetes-ing!