Minikube is an Open Source all-in-one Kubernetes cluster which runs on your Linux system. It is under the CNCF umbrella. The cluster operates inside a virtual machine and includes the container runtime environment that containers could run inside the node.

This is the easiest way to provision a Kubernetes cluster for testing and developing on your local environment.

Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to perform related Server Monitoring queries on Ubuntu Linux System.

In this context, we shall look into steps to install Minikube on your Ubuntu 20.04 machine.

How to Install Minikube on Ubuntu ?

To begin with this Installation procedure, make sure that you perform the following steps.

1. Update system APT

Always ensure that the system is up to date. So update the software packages list by running the following commands:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

Also install the below packages:

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

2. Install the VirtualBox for Minikube

In order to set up a single-node Kubernetes cluster with Minikube, you have to create a virtual machine on your Ubuntu machine. You can choose VirtualBox or KVM. In this guide, we use VirtualBox:

$ sudo apt install virtualbox virtualbox-ext-pack

3. Install Minikube

Now, it's time to download the latest Minikube from the official repository:

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

This command will install minikube to the system and you have to grant the execute permission to it:

$ chmod +x minikube-linux-amd64

Next, move the minikube file to /usr/local/bin directory:

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

To check the minikube version installed, execute the command:

$ minikube version

In order to provision the All-In-One Kubernetes cluster, let’s start the minikube by running the following command:

$ minikube start

How to Manage the Kubernetes cluster ?

To interact with the Kubernetes cluster, you have to install the kubectl tool with the below command:

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

To grant permission, execute the command:

$ chmod +x kubectl

Then, move the kubectl binary to /usr/local/bin:

$ sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin

Now, you can run some basic commands with kubectl to interact with your Kubernetes cluster. 

See below:

To show the running node:

$ kubectl get node

To get the cluster information:

$ kubectl cluster-info

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