Using local images with Minikube

Introduction

Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a Virtual Machine (VM) on your laptop for users looking to try out Kubernetes or develop with it day-to-day.

This article explains how you can use Minikube’s built-in Docker daemon without having to push images to a remote registry when trying out things locally, which speeds up local experiments.

Steps

Start Minikube with:

minikube start

To be able to work with Minikube’s docker daemon on your mac/linux host, use the docker-env command in your current shell:

eval $(minikube docker-env)

You can see containers in the Minikube registry with:

docker ps

Build your image with the docker build command.

On your deployment manifest, set spec.containers.imagePullPolicy to Never, otherwise kubernetes won’t use the images you built locally.

...
  spec:
    containers:
    - name: sampleApp
      image: sampleApp:0.0.1
      imagePullPolicy: Never
      ports:
      ...

When you do not wish to use Minikube docker registry, you can unset the Minikube variables from your shell with:

eval $(minikube docker-env -u)

Kosy Anyanwu

The lady who travels the world and loves karaoke

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