How to use Kubernetes locally?

3 min readMay 18, 2020

A few words about Kubectl and Minikube

We use Kubernetes to make our life easier when we have a real product and cloud. There are a lot of reasons to use Kubernetes with clouds like AWS, GCP, or Azure. This is not the topic of this article.

The question is how to test your work before using a cloud you’ve chosen. And here Kubectl and minilube come. This stack permits to test everything on your PC.

Install Minikube and Kubectl

Install on Mac OS X

Installed both with brew throw the terminal

brew install minikube
brew install kubectl

Error I had

If you will install kubectl before minikube and check kubectl version, you’ll see the error :

error: Missing or incomplete configuration info. Please point to an existing, complete config file

kubectl version

After the installation and start of minikube, the issue disappears

minikube start

Kubectl works.

Kubectl configs

Kubectl configs saved in $HOME/.kube/config.

cd
cat .kube/config

Example of my configs after the installation.

Useful commands

Minikube commands

minikube version
minikube start
minikube stop
minikube start --driver=virtualbox
minikube start --driver=hyperkit
minikube delete

Minikube dashboard

minikube dashboard

Kubectl commands

kubectl version
kubectl get nodes
kubectl --namespace=mystuff #to change a namespace
kubectl --all-namespaces
kubectl config set-context my-context --namespace=mystuff #create context
kubectl config use-context my-context # start using context
kubectl get <resource> #get resouce from kubernetes from the current namespace, -o, -o json, -o yaml
kubectl describe <resource-name> <obj-name>
kubectl get pods my-pod -o jsonpath --template={.status.podIP} #get ip
kubectl apply -f obj.yaml
kubectl label pods bar color=red #add labal
kubectl label pods bar color- #remove label
kubectl logs <pod-name>
kubectl exec -it <pod-name> -- bash
kubectl top nodes
kubectl top pods
minikube service <service_name> --url

Deploy simple hello minikube with Kubectl

https://kubernetes.io/fr/docs/tutorials/hello-minikube/

Map Kubectl to different contexts

kubectl config get-contexts

kubectl config use-context docker-desktop
kubectl config get-contexts

The current context was changed to Docker desktop

On the desktop docker app, it’s possible to change it directly in menu

Command Autocompletion

kubectl supports integration with your shell to enable tab completion for both commands and resources

# macOS
brew install bash-completion# CentOS/Red Hat
yum install bash-completion# Debian/Ubuntu
apt-get install bash-completions

Done

Now you are ready to work on your machine, play with K8 commands and learn everything you need without any cloud platform.

Thanks

Thank you for your attention.

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