Minikube: Troubleshooting Installation Issues

Issue the command to start Minikube:

minikube start

The first error we see is a permission denied type, so let's look at permissions:

ls -la

We'll see that the minikub directory is owned by root, so let's change that:

sudo chown -R $USER /home/cloud_user/.minikube

Now when we run minikub start again, we get an error about VBoxManage not found. This is because we're set up to download a VM boot image and create a VirtualBox VM. We don't have VitrualBox, because we're already on a cloud user. Our current VM driver is set to VirtualBox (which we can see with minikub config view), and we've got to change that. We're going to set it to none:

minikube config set vm-driver none

Now let's try starting again, with this:

sudo minikube start

This time around, we'll get an error about an unspported version of Kubernetes. We need to be running 1.16.1, and it looks like we're trying here to run 1.11.0*. Let's fix that with a configuration command, then try to start Minikub again:

minikube config set kubernetes-version 1.16.1
sudo minikube start

Now we've got an error telling us that the Docker executable is not in the $PATH. Is Docker even installed? Let's fix that and try again:

sudo apt install -y docker.io
sudo minikube start

This time, we made it through the install. But wait! What is the status of Minikub? Find out with this:

minikube status

Ahh, we're getting another permission denied error. We don't have permission to open ~/.minikub/machines/minikub/config.json. We'll get another one if we try to get our pod status:

kubectl get po

This error tells us that we don't have permission to access ~/.kube/config.

We will need to take ownership of the .minikube and .kube directories:

sudo chown -R $USER /home/cloud_user/.kube
sudo chown -R $USER /home/cloud_user/.minikube

Now when we execute minikub status, we'll see that everything is running and configured. Then kubectl get po -A will show us the cluster, up and running.

Create the objects:

kubectl apply -f /home/cloud_user/local

Now we can verify that the objects were created:

kubectl get po
kubectl get pv
kubectl get pvc