Install Kubernetes with minikube and docker on Ubuntu

When someone just wants to play around Kubernetes on its local environment without accessing to Cloud provider resources, one can set Kubernetes up on local environment with minikube with single node mode.

This post will provide a simple guideline on how to set up KUbernetes with minikube and docker on Ubuntu.

Before all the steps can be started, you may need to first set up kubectl which is a command line tool to operate on Kubernetes resources.

Post that, can ensure that docker is installed on Ubuntu, in case it's not installed, can follow below steps.

1. Update local software repository database
   

   sudo apt-get update​

2. (Optional) Uninstall old docker in case it's existing
   

   sudo apt-get remove docker docker-engine docker.io​

3. Install docker
   

   sudo apt install docker.io​

4. Once installation is done, can set it up to be ran at system start
   

   sudo systemctl start docker
   sudo systemctl enable docker​

5. Check that whether the daemon service is up and docker is available
   

   k8s@k8s-VirtualBox:~$ docker version
   Client:
    Version:           20.10.2
    API version:       1.41
    Go version:        go1.13.8
    Git commit:        20.10.2-0ubuntu1~20.04.2
    Built:             Tue Mar 30 21:24:57 2021
    OS/Arch:           linux/amd64
    Context:           default
    Experimental:      true
   
   Server:
    Engine:
     Version:          20.10.2
     API version:      1.41 (minimum version 1.12)
     Go version:       go1.13.8
     Git commit:       20.10.2-0ubuntu1~20.04.2
     Built:            Mon Mar 29 19:10:09 2021
     OS/Arch:          linux/amd64
     Experimental:     false
    containerd:
     Version:          1.3.3-0ubuntu2.3
     GitCommit:        
    runc:
     Version:          spec: 1.0.2-dev
     GitCommit:        
    docker-init:
     Version:          0.19.0
     GitCommit:        
   ​

   You should see both client and server information. In case no server information is found and it says permission error, you need to add the current user into user group docker. By default, only users in docker group can access this information, otherwise sudo command is needed.
   To add the current user into the docker user group, can run below command
   

   sudo usermod -aG docker $USER​

   Post that, log out as current user and login back(If you are in Virtual Machine, you may need to restart the system)

Once docker is installed, one can proceed to install minikube. Below are the steps to be followed.

1. Get the command to install minikube from https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/
   

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

2. The command is pretty straightforward, it downloads the minikube binary and install it. Run below command to verify it's installed successfully.
   

   k8s@k8s-VirtualBox:~$ minikube version
   minikube version: v1.20.0
   commit: c61663e942ec43b20e8e70839dcca52e44cd85ae
   ​

3. Next can run minikube start to start the cluster
   

   minikube start --driver=docker​

   This tells minikube to use docker as the driver instead of virtualbox(default one).
4. Once it's started, can run minikube status to check its status.
   

   k8s@k8s-VirtualBox:~$ minikube status
   minikube
   type: Control Plane
   host: Running
   kubelet: Running
   apiserver: Running
   kubeconfig: Configured​

5. Next, can just run normal kubectl commands to access the Kubernetes cluster
   

   k8s@k8s-VirtualBox:~$ kubectl get pods
   NAME                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   hello-minikube-6ddfcc9757-9vl9s   1/1     Running   1          20h
   =​