Deploying K8s on your laptop with minikube

K8s on your laptop is helpful for initial development and testing environment. Minikube makes it easy to get K8s deployed on your laptop. Let's get K8s installed by doing the following:

1. Installing required tools: docker, minikube and kubectl
2. Deploying the minikube cluster with minikube start
3. Verifying you can deploy an application to your minikube cluster

Installing required tools

Install docker by following the steps outlined here:

# These steps are for ubuntu, you can follow steps for another distro if needed
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh

Verify docker was installed succesfully by running:

docker run hello-world

Note if you get permission denied then you might need to add yourself to the docker group. You can do this by running:

sudo usermod -a -G docker $USER
# make the change effective in current shell
newgrp docker

Install kubectl by following the steps outlined here:

curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
sudo install -o root -g root -m 0755 kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

Install minikube by following the steps outlined here:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

All required tools have now been installed.

Deploying K8s on your laptop

Follow steps of the "Start your cluster" section outlined here:

minikube start

Verify that you can access your cluster by running:

kubectl get nodes

Deploying an application to your K8s cluster

Let's deploy a simple web application by running:

kubectl create deployment hello-minikube \
  --image=kicbase/echo-server:1.0

You can expose the application on port 8080 by running:

kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=NodePort --port=8080
minikube service hello-minikube

The minikube service command should have setup port forwarding for you and opened a browser so you can access the application.