Letters from a maladroit

Setting up Kubernetes for local development

February 23, 2020

These setup instructions are also posted on Github at my Kubernetes Experiments repository.

These instructions will also reference code from that repository, specifically step 2.2.

1. Environment setup

  • minikube
  • kubectl
  • docker (for macOS)
  • python 3.7 (via Anaconda)

1.1 Install minikube and kubectl CLI tools via gcloud:

I use GCP for production deployments, so I’m installing kubectl and minikube from gcloud to avoid version discrepancies.

Homebrew can also be used to install kubectl and minikube.

# Install kubectl and minikube via gcloud
gcloud components install kubectl;
gcloud components install minikube;

# Make sure we have the latest versions of kubectl and minikube
gcloud components update;

1.2 Install Docker for macOS:

Follow the instructions here: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/install/

1.3 Start minikube

# Starts a node Kubernete cluster using Virtualbox/VMWareFusion
minikube start;

# Enables a plugin that allows minikube to use a local docker repository,
# so we don't have to use DockerHub or GCR.
minikube addons enable registry;

# Enables an nginx frontend that will route incoming requests to different services
minikube addons enable ingress;

1.4 Create a new Anaconda environment

conda create --name kubernetes-experiment python=3.7;
conda activate kubernetes-experiment;

2. Set up Kubernetes Dashboard Web UI

Kubernetes comes with an admin dashboard that shows information about the cluster, such as what pods are running and what jobs have run.

2.1 Install web UI

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/dashboard/v2.0.0-rc5/aio/deploy/recommended.yaml;

2.2 Create admin user with cluster admin role

In order to access the dashboard, we need to create an admin account and give the account the cluster-admin role.

kubectl apply -f kubernetes/kube-dash/admin-user.yaml;
kubectl apply -f kubernetes/kube-dash/cluster-role.yaml;

2.3 Viewing the web UI

To view the dashboard, we need to run this command in a separate terminal:

kubectl proxy

Now we can view the dashboard at: http://localhost:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kubernetes-dashboard/services/https:kubernetes-dashboard:/proxy/

2.4 Logging in to the web UI

To log in to the web UI we need to get an access token, which can be done with this command:

kubectl -n kubernetes-dashboard describe secret $(kubectl -n kubernetes-dashboard get secret | grep admin-user | awk '{print $1}')

Copy and paste this token into the web UI.

2.5 Resources: