08. February 2021

Introducing Minikube Support Tools

by Christian Fritz | 580 words | ~3 min read

kubernetes minikube cert-manager nginx-ingress oss open source

minikube-support-run.png

In this blog post, we want to introduce the minikube-support tools, which we recently released in the first version. The minikube-support tools are intended to automate and simplify common tasks which you need to do every time you set up a new minikube cluster. For this, they combine some cluster internal and external tools to provide a better interaction between minikube and the developers local os. Basically the minikube-support tools are a collection of tools and their configuration which are usually required to work or develop with a minikube cluster but are not pre-installed or properly configured.

Idea

The idea for the minikube-support tools was born in 2019 when we discovered that nearly every time we wanted to use minikube, we needed to do the same steps after creating a new minikube cluster. The first idea was to use a bunch of shell scripts which install the tools and try to configure them properly. Even with those scripts there were some steps which were not automated. One point was to write the hostnames, and the correct minikube ip into the /etc/hosts file. Of course this also was a repeating step for every new hostname which we want to publish using an ingress.

That was the point where the idea came up to combine all into a single command line tool. Basically it should meet the following two requirements:

  1. Install and configure all the components which were usually required and
  2. Simplify the access to services and ingresses within the cluster.

Features

The main entry point to run everything on the current minikube instance, is the minikube-support command. For this it installs, configures and provides the following tools and features:

  • A local CoreDNS instance to access the services and ingresses using a domain name *.minikube.
  • mkcert to set up a locally-trusted CA for generating certificates for the domain names served by CoreDNS.
  • The Cert-Manager to manage that certificate generation within the cluster using the locally-trusted CA created by mkcert.
  • A Nginx Ingress Controller to provide access to the ingresses deployed in minikube.
  • A dashboard that shows the status of ingresses, LoadBalancer-Services, served DNS entries and the minikube tunnel status.

Quickstart

  1. Install minikube:

    • Download the latest release and place it somewhere into your $PATH or use our brew tap:

      1

      brew install qaware/minikube-support/minikube-support
  2. Start your cluster minikube start
  3. Install internal and external components with minikube-support install -l
    • If you don’t want to install the external components (mkcert, CoreDNS), because you already installed it, just run minikube-support install.
  4. Run the dashboard: minikube-support run
minikube-support run dashboard

The minikube-support run dashboard

  1. Deploy our application or use our test deployment:

    1

    kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qaware/minikube-support/master/docs/demo-deployment.yaml

  2. Open your application in your browser when it is visible in the “Status of Coredns-Grpc” box.

Configuration

The minikube-support tools do not have their own configuration properties, but require to configure the dns resolver of the local os. For macOS the minikube-support tools will do this automatically. Just ensure that all your ingresses uses the top level domain .minikube.

For Windows and Linux systems there are no known interfaces or configuration properties to configure conditional forwarding for DNS requests to .minikube programmatically. In this case you have to configure your DNS resolving by your own.

Acknowledgements

This cli tool was developed by Christian Fritz and was gratefully supported by QAware by allowing me to do that during paid working hours.

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