Minikube Tips & Tricks

A collection of minikube best practices and tips to improve the developer experience running a local Kubernetes cluster.

Minikube is a popular option to run a local Kubernetes cluster on macOS, Linux, and Windows. While it boasts a rich feature sets and cross-platform support, minikube behaves slightly differently than a full-featured Kubernetes cluster that often confuses developers and new Kubernetes users looking to test their application locally. In this post, we’ll cover some common pitfalls and tips to make the minikube experience more seamless for your development team.

(NOTE: for alternative Kubernetes solutions, please see “Kubernetes for Local Development”)

Give Minikube More CPU & Memory

By default, minikube starts with 2 CPUs and 2 GBs of memory, which may be enough for a smaller team testing out a few microservices. However, once minikube is used to run integration tests with databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, Redis) and message queues (e.g Kafka), minikube will crash as it exhausts the resources limit. To avoid this, first provision more resources to the underlying driver (i.e. VirtualBox, Docker, etc):