Minikube Issues

Recently I went to set up Minikube on my development laptop. I'm runnning Fedora 27, and things went pretty well. There was an issue that took me a bit of research to work through. This is a record for future reference.

Why Can't Minikube Pull the Container Image

Maybe I should have paid more attention to Kubernetes for the last few years (ok, it's taken over -- I really should have had). But I didn't, and I'm about to use it in a new position, so I wanted to play with a few tutorials locally to get a feel for things.

This should have taken me a few minutes. But everytime I typed

kubectl create service service-name
kubectl get service service-name

Minikube told me that the service had an error pulling the image from Docker. Running it with

docker run service-name

worked without problem.

It's the Registry

Minikube, by default, looks to Docker Hub to pull images. Not to your local images. So I'd build my Dockerfile, tell Kubernetes to pull it, and it would look in Docker Hub. Since I had not pushed my image to Docker Hub, Kubernetes failed.

The solution was pretty simple. I set up a local Docker Repository and pushed my image there as described here.

As for images, they had to be tagged and pushed to the local registry properly. It's well described in the documentation page linked above.

Then I restarted Minikube with the new flag --insecure-registry.

minikube stop
minikube start --insecure-registry=<ip-address>:5000

But Kubernetes still wouldn't pull the image. What?

Make Minikube Rebuild Itself

Basically, Minikube needs to rebuild itself to have new flags take effect. The recommendation is to do something like

minikube stop
minikube delete
minikube start --insecure-registry=<ip-address>:5000

But I also deleted the ~/.minikube directory after stopping Minikube. That forced it to re-download the ISO used by VirtualBox and ensured that everything was rebuilt with the correct flag in force.

Lastly I made sure my deployment scripts had their images referenced as

<ip-address>:5000/<image-name>

Voila! Everything works fine now.