How to Install Minikube on Debian 10 (Buster)

If you are looking for an easy and cost-effective way of getting started with Kubernetes, then Minikube is your go to resource. So what is Minikube? Minikube is a free and opensource Kubernetes implementation that allows you to create a virtual machine locally on your PC and deploy a simple one-cluster node. Minikube provides a command-line interface that enables you to manage cluster operations such as starting, stopping and deleting nodes from the cluster. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Minikube on Debian 10 (Buster).

Prerequisites for Minikube

• A newly installed instance of Debian 10 Buster
• A regular user with sudo
• A stable internet connection

Let’s now roll our sleeves and get into installing Minikube on Debian 10.

Step 1) Apply updates & install minikube dependencies

First and foremost, we need to update the system packages on our instance. To achieve this, execute the commands:

$ sudo apt update -y
$ sudo apt upgrade -y

Additionally, ensure that you have installed the necessary packages to enable you execute subsequent commands later on in this guide.

$ sudo apt install curl wget apt-transport-https -y

Step 2) Install KVM hypervisor

To create virtual machines, we will need to have a hypervisor installed. In this guide, we are using KVM hypervisor. Check out this guide for more on  how to install KVM hypervisor in Debian 10

Step 3) Install Minikube

Once you have the KVM hypervisor is in place, then use the wget command to download the latest Minikube library as shown.

$ wget https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64

Next, copy the binary file to the /usr/local/bin path as shown

$ sudo cp minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

Be sure to assign execute permissions to the file.

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

At this point, you can check the version of Minikube installed by running the command below. At the time of writing this guide. The latest version of Minikube is Minikube v1.15.1

$ minikube version

output of above command would be:

[email protected]:~$ minikube version
minikube version: v1.15.1
commit: 23f40a012abb52eff365ff99a709501a61ac5876
[email protected]:~$

Step 4) Install kubectl tool

Kubectl is Kubernetes command-line tool that enables you to execute commands against a Kubernetes cluster. With kubectl, you can deploy applications, manage and inspect cluster resources including having a peek at the log files.

To install kubectl , you first need to download the binary file using the curl command as shown:

$ curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/`curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt`/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl

Make the binary file executable.

$ chmod +x ./kubectl

Next, move the binary file to your path as shown.

$ sudo mv ./kubectl /usr/local/bin

You can now verify the installation by running the command:

$ kubectl version -o yaml

Step 4) Starting Minikube

To start Minikube run the command:

$ minikube start

The command automatically select the KVM driver, downloads the virtual machine boot image and creates a Kubernetes cluster with a single node.

You can access Minikube on the command-line by running the command

$ minikube ssh

To exit from the shell, simply run:

$ exit

To stop a Kubernetes cluster run :

$ sudo minikube stop

To view the status of Minikube, run following minikube command:

[email protected]:~$ minikube status
minikube
type: Control Plane
host: Running
kubelet: Running
apiserver: Running
kubeconfig: Configured
[email protected]:~$

Run below command to verify status of node

[email protected]:~$ kubectl get nodes
NAME       STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION
minikube   Ready    master   3h54m   v1.19.4
[email protected]:~$

To verify the status of the cluster, invoke the  command:

$ kubectl cluster-info

Some output similar to what we have will be displayed on the terminal.

Additionally, to get a glance at kubectl’s default configuration, run the command:

$ kubectl config view

Step 6) Accessing Kubernetes dashboard

Kubernetes comes with built-in dashboard that allows you to manage your cluster. To view all the addons that come with minikube run:

$ minikube addons list

To activate the Kubernetes dashboard, execute:

$ minikube dashboard

This will trigger your default web browser to pop open the Kubernetes dashboard as shown below:

Perfect! We have successfully installed Minikube on Debian 10 and automatically created a single-node Kubernetes cluster.

Also Read : How to Setup Kubernetes(k8s) Cluster in HA with Kubeadm