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Setting up local Kubernetes on a virtual machine

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Bezunesh
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3 min read

Here is how I set up local Kubernetes on a DigitalOcean virtual machine(VM) using minikube.

minikube is a local Kubernetes, that allows to create and work on Kubernetes cluster locally. Requirements for setting up minikube.

  • 2 CPUs or more
  • 2GB of free memory
  • 20GB of free disk space
  • A virtual machine manger, e.g. Docker

Make sure your instance meets the above hardware requirements. In my case, my DigitalOcean droplet(VM) was running on 1 CPU, 1GB of RAM, 25 GB disk space. Since that was not enough, I had to resize it to 2 CPUs and 2GB of RAM.

Then installed Docker as follows:

1. Setup package repository and Install Docker

Setup the repository

Connect to your digital ocean instance using ssh and then:

Update package index and install packages to enable https access to a package repository

$ sudo apt-get update

 $ sudo apt-get install \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg-agent \
    software-properties-common

Add Docker'ss GPG key

$ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Add the stable package repository. 

$ sudo add-apt-repository \
   "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
   $(lsb_release -cs) \
   stable"

Install Docker Engine

$ sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Verify Docker's installation using the following command. It will download a test image and run it in a container. When the container runs, it prints an informational message and exits.

 $ sudo docker run hello-world

One last thing, add your user to the “docker” group so that you can use docker as a non-root user

sudo usermod -aG docker <your-user>

Now that we have all the requirements for minikube in place, we can go ahead and install minikube.

2. minikube

My VM is on Linux Ubuntu and has amd64 / x86_64 architecture. You can find out your VM's info using the command uname -a

Install minikube

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube_latest_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i minikube_latest_amd64.deb

Start a cluster

minikube start

Get minikube dashboard

minikube dashboard allows to have a visual representation of the resources that exist on the local cluster. To obtain the dashboard's URL use the command:

minikube dashboard  --url

Now, the returned URL is a local address (127.0.0.1) which refers to the Digital Ocean VM. In order to have access from our local machine we can create an SSH tunnel.

Example

minikube dashboard URL
127.0.0.1:33411/api/v1/namespaces/kubernete..

Create an SSH tunnel
ssh -N -L 8888:127.0.0.1:33411 -i KEYFILE username@IPAddressOfTheVM

NOTE: If successful, the above command will create an SSH tunnel but will not display any output on the server console.

This will create a secure tunnel by forwarding the destination port: (127.0.0.1:33411) on the remote server to a source port (8888) on the local host/machine.

Then, open the dashboard URL in a browser to view the components of the kubernetes cluster. It should look something like this:

Screen Shot 2021-03-01 at 00.31.05.png

If you made it this far, Bravo!!! Would love to read your feedback below.

References:

KubernetesDigitalOceanDevopsCloudDocker