Installing Minikube in the Cloud

Install the container runtime, Docker in this case:

sudo apt install -y docker.io

Retrieve and then install the Minikube deb package:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube_1.4.0.deb
sudo dpkg -i minikube_1.4.0.deb

Once this is installed, set the default driver to none:

sudo minikube config set vm-driver none

Now start Minikube

sudo minikube start

Enable Users to Manage Environments

For the developers to manage their own environments, they need to own certain directories. Let's give them ownership with this:

sudo chown -R $USER $HOME/.kube $HOME/.minikube

In order to create a deployment we will need to install kubectl:

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

Now we'll have a kubectl file sitting in our directory (ls will show it) that we have to execute. Make it executable first, then move it to one of the directories where other executables are stored (/usr/local/bin in this case):

chmod +x ./kubectl
sudo mv ./kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl

Now we want to make sure that we can see our Minikube setup and our Kubernetes cluster using kubectl:

sudo kubectl get po -A

Create and Expose a Deployment

Create a deployment, in this case Nginx:

sudo kubectl create deployment --image nginx my-nginx

To access the deployment we will need to expose it:

sudo kubectl expose deployment my-nginx --port=80 --type=NodePort

Once this is done, we need to determine where to access the Nginx default page:

sudo minikube service list

Once we have the output of this command, we'll aim a curl command at the Nginx service on the service IP and port that the service has mapped to. Look for the row in the output of that last command that has our my-nginx as a NAME. There's a local IP and port in the TARGET PORT column. Our next command will look something like this:

curl http://<LOCAL_IP>:<PORT>

In order to expose our application, we've got to install a proxy first:

sudo apt install -y nginx

Edit the Default Site

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

We're going to change the line that reads:

try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

so that it instead reads something like:

proxy_pass http://<LOCAL_IP>:<PORT>;

This is going to be right around line 50 in the file, and note that this http address and port we've added are what we got from the minikube command we ran a little bit ago. Now we can save the file, then make Nginx read the config again with:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Test in a Browser

Back on our hands-on lab overview page, grab the public IP of our server. Paste that address into a new browser tab, and we should land at our Welcome to nginx! page.