Configuring Kubernetes on bare-metal boxes is the stuff of Legends in the industry.

Thankfully, you will not normally do this. You will mostly work with managed kubernetes clusters provided by a service provider like AWS or GCP. Unfortunately, spinning up a managed kube cluster will cost money. To avoid this Kubernetes.io has created Minikube which is a kube cluster that runs on your laptop on a Virtual Machine.

Limitations of Minikube

  1. It does not support more than 1 node so its not possible to test things like distribution across nodes.
  2. It is not designed for production deployments.

Setting up

The instructions at
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-minikube/
are pretty self explanatory.

Running Minikube

 minikube start --vm-driver=virtualbox

You can replace virtualbox with the VM you are using. On my 18.04 ubuntu virtualbox was super easy to install.

On linux you can also do the below if you dont want to install a VM.

minikube start --vm-driver=none

You should see something like this.

successful minikube start

Testing your Minikube setup

To test minikube setup you will need to install kubectl. To do this you can follow the instructions here
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/

Running the command kubectl config get-contexts should give you this output.

$ kubectl config get-contexts
CURRENT   NAME       CLUSTER    AUTHINFO   NAMESPACE
*         minikube   minikube   minikube

kubectl get nodes

NAME   STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION
m01    Ready    master   15h   v1.17.3

This means your Minikube is ready and working.